An Exhausting and Rewarding Weekend

Whew!  What a weekend of work.  Friday evening my daring friend, Lauren, and I decided to attempt making fresh pasta because I picked up a pasta roller the weekend before.  I had tried doing this once long ago and didn’t think it had been too bad.  We tried a whole wheat pasta recipe using Amish whole wheat white flour from the Clintonville Coop mixed with a little of our all-purpose flour from our life before local.  The eggs were from Carousel Watergardens Farm that we picked up at the Columbus Winter Farmers Market.  While Lauren kneaded the dough, I whipped up another batch of crackers for munching over the weekend.  Later on we discovered the delectable wonder of the Meadow Maid baby swiss cheese  that we get at the Worthington Winter Market.  Once the dough was kneaded and had been properly refrigerated, we started rolling it out, which didn’t work out as well as we hoped and resulted in us getting flour all over the place!  Unfortunately, we didn’t read our instructions close enough and our stomachs were growling, so instead of rolling the pasta and then letting it sit for a little while, we cut it right after rolling, which resulted in a lot of little dough balls mixed in with our spaghetti.  We ended up getting through 3/4 of the dough before deciding it was time to get cooking.  We accidentally overcooked the pasta by a minute or so (which made the noodles somewhat mushy but the dough balls were al dente, haha!).  Approximately two hours after starting our project, we sat down to a hard earned meal.  We topped the pasta with Zapico pasta sauce that had some browned local hamburger mixed in.  Despite the fact that the noodles weren’t perfect, they were edible and we were pretty proud of ourselves for trying something new.  However, next time I go to make pasta, it will be a rainy weekend all-day activity that I don’t expect to depend on for a meal that day. 

Saturday we bottled our beer, which Jacob will post an entry about, I’m sure!  I will say it was a lot of fun with friends.

Sunday, we constructed the bed for the peas and filled that one along with one other raised bed and planted spinach and peas.  We still have four and a half beds to fill and we will definitely be happy for next year when we don’t have to do this again!  As we worked in the garden on Sunday morning, we realized that we had some success to report.  Our onions have started popping up and look absolutely beautiful.  For the heck of it, we had placed another small batch of them along the side of the house in poorer soil and those are doing just as well!  The yellow onions seem to be a bit slower than the white ones, but they are still coming along.  But the happiest discovery we had were spotting the little baby asparagus spears popping up (they are a little hard to spot because they are the same color as the dirt right now, but one of them is right in the center of this photo.)  We had planted the two year old roots a few weeks ago and were sort of holding our breath until now.  Of the 18 roots we put in, seven of them had decided they wanted to peek out at the sun yesterday.  Slowly but surely, our hard work is paying off!