Not many people can (openly) admit that have had a sleepover with their boss (and their bosses spouse!) but I can check that off of my list. To be extra creepy I suppose I could say that on Saturday night I actually had a sleepover with TWO of my bosses and their spouses, if you count my mom and dad. Ok, that's just weird. Anyway... why did I have this unusual sleepover you might ask? Well, where do I begin? I was Corinn's Intern at the East Lansing Art Festival after I graduated from MSU. Even though she is at a different place in her life (husband, small children, home owner, etc.) we simply 'got' each other. After knowing each other only one year (and 2 months) she has come to be a mentor of mine and a good friend of my entire family (to the extent that her and my mom are even friends on Facebook, haha). Before working for the East Lansing Art Festival Corinn had been a personal chef around the Lansing area. I have never doubted the woman could cook but I had been aching to try her famous homemade pasta that I had heard about. Finally, months after talking about it for the first time, my moment had arrived! Corinn and her husband Chris packed up a giant box of goodies, drove the kids over to Corinn's dad's house on the East side of the state, hopped on 96 W over to Grand Rapids!
Corinn learned how to make pasta from her grandmother while she was growing up and she was so accustom to her Italian roots that she didn't actually know that people DIDNT serve ravioli at Thanksgiving until her early twenties, haha. As soon as she stepped foot in the kitchen she grabbed her food processor out of the industrial travel box she brought and we began mixin' up the goods! 2 eggs, 1/2 cup of (good) olive oil, 1 cup semolina flour, 1 cup regular flour and we were rockin' and rollin'. Once the dough started bouncing around the food processor we knew it was ready. Then we used an attachment on the Kitchen Aid mixer to actually flatten the dough into the noodles and cut them into fettucini. Pasta dough is different than some types of dough that can get "over worked" - the more you work the pasta dough (by 'work' i mean bend, fold, tear, etc.) the stronger it gets. Once the noodles were made we would hang them on this little wooden drying rack and plop the noodles in the boiling water together. It was only a few minutes before they were done and a good way to tell was if they floated or not...who knew!
It's hard to tell if making homemade pasta was simple or if it was a figment of my imagination due to the magically refilling glass of cabernet that never seemed to go far...(Thanks Dad). Either way, the meal was absolutely incredible. We tried an assortment of noodles: regular, spinach and even eggless! We made ravioli with ricotta cheese and even some with butternut squash and marscapone! With fresh homemade pasta the need for sauce was minimal and we did most of our tasting with simply butter and fresh grated parmesan however Corinn has also brought along a "Sunday gravy" which was a tomato based sauce packed w. sausage, meatballs and pulled pork. Soo good! It was overall one of the best meals I have ever had and being able to watch Corinn helped take some of the mystery out of it. I am definitely going to try it on my own once I get the attachment for our KitchenAid Mixer! If you cross your fingers you might even be lucky enough to get a little snack pack for Christmas if my own batch turns out (no promises)!!
-Lizzie