I'm like that guy who wrote a love letter about his typewriter except about food.

Yesterday I gave a pasta-making demonstration to some people I work for.  I was kind of nervous about it because I wanted to show them how to use their hands to mix the dough and not a food processor, which is something I've only done once but I think it tastes better.  Yeah, I probably should have practiced, but I'm a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of gal.  Instead I went with talking about the process of making pasta and putting off actually making it for as long as possible.  I figured maybe they would forget why I was there?  I don't know.  Anyway, it didn't work, and while they were looking at me expectantly I took the first step and measured out the flour.  It's funny how something so simple can calm you down.  Measuring flour I know.  Cracking eggs?  Old hat.  Next came the tricky part of incorporating one into the other.  You make a "well" and sort of pinch the flour into the eggs.  As I was doing that I realized that I needed to be explaining as I went along.  One of the people got out a video camera.  My very own cooking show!

The thing about pasta as I've said before, is that it's not difficult to make really.  It just takes a lot of time and upper body strength.  Maybe I was more anxious about that last part, but as you knead the dough you think, wow I'm really earning this meal!  And the great thing about teaching is that if you show them how to do it once, you can make the students do the rest of the work. 

One of my "students" made an excellent point about the process of learning from a *cough cough* expert in a craft.  It's a shared experience doesn't happen often enough these days.  People teach themselves how to do things all the time using the internet or TV, but when another person takes the time to show you something, then you will always associate them with that process.  What a nice idea.

All in all, we came out with two great batches of fresh pasta, one of which we ate for lunch.  As the Barefoot Contessa would say,"How bad can that be?"

You Begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

-Margaret Atwood