Cooking Class: Lasagna Bolognese & Chiacchiere

Chiacchiere, is perhaps the word I struggle with the most when reading a passage out loud in class. My teacher quickly realized this and when she's feel extra sassy I somehow always get stuck reading that portion. When reading though it typically means chatter, small-talk, or gossip. Tonight though, it meant tasty fried batter covered with powder sugar and chocolate sauce. These yummy little treats are typically a carnivale treat and vary from those prepared in the past by being  drizzled with chocolate rather than blood. Why the name? Well, I guess someone thought the crunch when you bite into one sounded a little like chatter. Yeah. That has to be it because once these hit the table, there is no chatter to be heard...just the sounds of yum's and fat cells cheering.

Tonight it was our turn to try to make this seasonal treat. Come to think of it, the lasagna we made was also a seasonal thing. After spending the time rolling out the two different doughs with the pasta press I can now understand why they aren't made year round. Plus, who really wants their oven going for over an hour after various pots are boiling previous in the middle of the hot summer? But right now? It's a completely different story!

It was a very busy night but definitely hands on. We started off with the bolognese sauce (no veggie chopping this week!) and then worked on the second sauce for the lasagna that consisted primarily of flour, milk, and butter. As those simmered away it was time to start the pasta dough. Making the dough was easy, but the rolling out with the hand cranked roller took some time- especially since we had to get them to a small enough size before sending them through again to be the correct thickness. It was an arm workout. The product before being sent into the pot of boiling water wasn't very pretty. Nothing like our store bought frilly edged dry pasta. These were a much thicker and variously shaped wedges.

Once the table was cleared we started again with mounds of flour with a perfect volcano top to fill with things like sugar, eggs, rum, and orange concentrate. This dough was much sticker and smelled so fabulously sweet it was hard to resist especially as the next step took f-o-r-e-v-e-r. Mini wedges being sent through the roller until they were thinner than pie crust. Then they had to be sliced. Chef R, another regular and I took on this process trying to be a good productive line. I think I was the bottleneck but by my 4th attempt to chop the dough rapidly like Chef R, I was sort of catching on. Here's what it should look like:



And no, even if the pictures indicate my level of  concentration,  there is no way my technique looked anything like that. And mine didn't look like nice tortilla strips either, but it didn't matter because when they are fried they don't stay like that anyway. But seriously. Check out that table full of those suckers and we didn't use all the dough. We also noticed while checking out that they had 3 large plates full of them under glass. Yep. Our food productions are works of art! Or you know, we just made enough to get them through the weekend.

Arms tired, apron covered in flour, and hands scaly with dried dough it was time to assemble the lasagna. Sauce, noodles folding outward, sauce x2, cheese x2, noodles. Repeated until to top of pan and fold noodles back over. Bake for an hour and then let it sit for another to let the liquids/juice from the cheese and sauce to get absorbed by the noodles. Luckily he had already made one and we didn't have to wait for the one we really made.

The other perk of this week (other than learning an Italian classic) is I learned where to buy some of the kitchen gadgets that I drool over each week...like the meat pounder, strainer-bowl for items just out of the frier, and even some of the huge pots. I think it's time to start rearranging my kitchen to make room for some of these soon to be mine items. Just getting the kitchen ready for my visitors!