Hausfrau day because it's too god dang cold

Holy shit it's COLD.  Like frigid winds and temperatures below freezing cold.  Like there's no way in hell I'm actually going to do anything outside cold.  Ugh, at least there's no snow.  Fortunately, all my babies are stayin' strong.  The ones in the potting shed kinda have to fend for themselves, but all my delicate warm weather stuff is in the greenhouse, and that has a little electric heater that keeps everything from turning into potting soil popsicles.  So in general I've been doing a lot of cooking and baking and indoor planning stuff.  Lori and I spent like two days doing nothing but baking lasagna and making pasta.  Lori works part time at this super cute kitchen store downtown, and as part of a First Friday event they said they would pay us to make a whole ton of lasagna and hand out samples so they could show off their pasta roller.  We've done a couple of these things before for them, we made tarts, horderves for wine tastings, and I've helped serve other peoples culinary works.

But this was by far the best, rolling pasta is WAY too much fun.  And it tastes soooo much better.  I was literally just eating the ends of the raw dough that we had cut off when trimming the noodles. 

 All together we made four full sized lasagnas (two vegi, two meat) and one small one for us.  We used over 6 pounds of mozzarella, a gallon of ricotta, two dozen eggs and a little more than a sack of flour.

The vegetarian ones were easily the best.  We had a leek/mushroom/kale lasagna with a blue cheese cream sauce and a winter squash/mushroom/caramelized onion lasagna with a parmesan cream sauce.  Notice the common theme of cream sauce, I mean come on now, those weak beef bolognese sauces on the meat lasagnas didn't stand a chance.  But then again, I'm kind of a sucker for a good white lasagna so maybe I'm biased.  That and it was the first time in a long time I had cooked with grocery store ground beef (the kitchen store bought all our ingredients.)  I'd kinda forgotten how when you cook it it disintegrates into little granules, so that it has both the color and shape of sandy gravel.  Like something you'd put in the bottom of a fish tank.  I was not pleased.  When I make a meat sauce, I want a MEAT sauce, like with actual identifiable chunks of meat.  I mean you wouldn't have been able to tell we'd put two pounds of beef into this thing unless you'd strained it through a sieve.  Ugh, totally weak. 

All in all though it was fun times and good eats and I definitely want to make more pasta.  Maybe get some fun roller attachments so we can make penne and gnocchi and other fun shapes.  Lori figures if we make pasta like once every two weeks or so, and make enough to dry and save, eventually we'll have a big enough store that we won't have to buy pasta anymore.  Which would be AWESOME.  But anyway, hopefully the weather will warm up again in the next couple days and I can actually write something garden related!