Wedding and Honeymoon Spectacular: Homemade Pasta with Roasted Tomatoes, Garlic and Olive Oil

Getting married is pretty awesome. Aside from the whole getting to spend the rest of your life with your favorite person, it also comes with tons of awesome kitchen gadgets for free!

Yeah, the wedding was kind of perfect.

Following a truly epic wedding featuring some of the best food and greatest dance moves of my life, Robin and I embarked on a perfect relaxing and delicious honeymoon in Napa. Sadly, we were forced to eventually return to work and the real world, but this weekend we decided to at least briefly relive the awesomeness by busting out our shiny new KitchenAid Pasta Maker and uncorking a bottle from our favorite winery of the trip- Silver Trident (Seriously, the food pairing, wine tasting, and people were so amazing that we joined the Wine Club).

Egg Pasta with Roasted Tomatoes, Garlic, and Olive Oil
Recipe from Serious Eats
Time: 75 minutes
Servings: 4

Pasta
10 oz (2 cups) all-purpose flour
2 whole large eggs
4 yolks from large eggs
1 tsp salt
Water, if necessary

Whole tomatoes
4-6 cloves garlic, whole
Basil, chopped
Olive Oil
Pecorino cheese, grated
Wine

I'm amazed that something so tasty could come from something so simple.

1. Get married and receive lots of cool wedding kitchen gifts like a pasta maker. 
2. Open a bottle of your tastiest red wine and get ready for some fun.
3. Roast the tomatoes and garlic in the oven at 425 F for 30-60 minutes until roasted to your liking.
4. I highly recommend reading the full Serious Eats article and the accompanying experimental pasta making article for a far better description of how everything should look than I will ever be able to give.
5. Pour flour into a large mound on a clean work surface. Make a large well in the center and fill it with the eggs, yolks, and salt. 
6. Beat the egg components together well with a fork. Then slowly combine with the flour until a sticky dough begins to form.
7. Use a bench knife to scrape excess dough and fold additional flour into the dough until a dry ball begins to form (2-5 minutes).
8. Knead the dough with the heel of your hand, rotating 45 degrees each time. Continue until the dough becomes smooth and elastic (about 5 minutes). If the dough is too wet, add extra flour 1 tsp at a time, or if it is too dry, lightly mist it with water.

   

   Our ball of pasta dough after Robin demonstrated her master kneading technique.

9. Tightly wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let sit for 30 minutes.
10. Cut the dough into 4 quarters, keeping unused portions wrapped until they are ready.
11. Roll the dough out onto lightly floured parchment paper into an oblong shape ~1/2 inch thick.
12. Place the pasta maker on its widest setting and pass the dough through 3 times.

    

    Pasta Maker!

13. Fold the ends of the dough in so they meet, then fold the dough in half at the point where they touch. Roll back to 1/2 inch thick and pass through at the widest setting again 3 times.

    

    Pretend you're making the tastiest but least exciting origami
14. Repeat the folding step, pass through the next smaller setting 3 times, and repeat as necessary until you reach the desired thickness (we stopped at setting 4). If the dough gets holes in it, just repeat the folding and run it through the setting again.
15. Repeat with the remaining quarters. Be sure to cover the stretched out pasta with parchment paper to prevent it from drying out. 

    

    Robin made the perfect looking noodle up top, while I made the special, lovable one below...

16. Pass the dough through a pasta cutter if desired. This cut pasta is much trickier to catch. Lightly dust the pasta with flour and roll into nests.

    

    Nests!

17. Boil in salted water with a touch of olive oil for 60-90 seconds.
18. Drain the pasta and serve with the roasted tomatoes, garlic, a drizzle of olive oil, basil, and cheese.
19. Refill wine glass as needed.

The finished product. It somehow tasted even better than it looks.

Everything about this meal perfectly transported us back to the complete and total utter bliss of the honeymoon. Making pasta by itself is a whole lot of fun. While there may be a lot of steps, none of them are all that complicated, and the results speak for themselves. The egg-packed noodles were full of flavor on their own and had an amazing texture. Robin's decision to top them with simple roasted tomatoes, garlic, basil, olive oil, and cheese (with Pecorino providing a nice bolder alternative to parmesan) instead of a complex sauce was truly inspired. The result was a light and refreshing dish that I could've spent the entire weekend eating. Our bottle of Silver Trident's Playing with Fire red blend was the perfect compliment to our pasta and made us even more excited for an anniversary to finally get here so we can travel back to Napa.

The perfect companion to our pasta- Silver Trident's Playing with Fire Red Wine Blend

Like I said, it was perfect. You can check at more at the amazing photographer's blog.

Dinner with Mac & Sacha: White Wine Poached Fish

Now that Maconda and Sacha have a fancy grown-up person house, they finally have the space to utilize their fancy grown-up wedding gifts. When presented with the opportunity to use said fancy adult things on their sparkling new island kitchen-top, I couldn't resist. The only problem was figuring out what splendiferous culinary feat we should make. Initially, my thoughts turned to trying painstakingly time-hungry new techniques like braising or making confit in honor of Sacha's homeland, but our adult responsibilities (read: my video games aren't gonna play themselves) led to a compromise. We'd teach ourselves the time friendly skill of poaching (read: we wanted an excuse to drink wine, and I always wanted to describe myself to strangers as "a poacher"). Their shiny new kitchen would be broken in with a delightful meal of wine-poached fish, bruschetta and roasted cauliflower.

Wine-Poached Fish

Adapted from The New York Times

Servings: 6

Time: 40 minutes

6 fish fillets (I recommend cod)

Salt and Freshly ground pepper

1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

4-5 tbsp finely chopped shallot

1 1/2 cups chardonnay 

2 garlic cloves, minced

3 tbsp capers, rinsed 

1/3 cup fresh lemon juice

3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

4 tbsp finely chopped parsley

Wine poaching: the drunken hot sauna of fish

Not broccoli au gratin!

1. Go to Kroger.
2. Be very disappointed in their fish selection and convince yourself the recipe will be good enough to carry the meal.
3. Preheat the oven to 400 F. 
4. Oil or butter a large baking dish then lay the fish in one layer and season with salt and pepper.
5. Sauté the shallots in olive oil over medium heat until tender and translucent.
6. Add the wine and bring to a boil.
7. Pour the wine over the fish, cover with foil and bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes or until the fish becomes opaque and pulls apart easily with a fork.
8. Remove the fish from the baking dish and place on a covered platter to keep warm.
9. Reduce the poaching wine in a skillet to ~1/3 cup then add in the garlic cloves, capers, lemon juice, olive oil, parsley and salt to taste. Let cook for ~ 2 minutes.
10. Pour the sauce over the fish and serve.

Yes, mask the lowly tilapia in delicious sauce topping.

It turns out the simple (20ish minute) technique of poaching is an incredible way to prepare fish. The end result had the absolute perfect texture for fish- beautifuly smooth and tender (almost buttery). Each bite came off effortlessly with a gentle pull from our forks, while the acidity of the picatta like sauce imparted wonderfully powerful flavors to the unassuming fish. The only improvement I would make to the sauce would be to add some butter at the very end to make it even more rich and help thicken it some (just cut the end olive oil, turn off the heat, add butter and let it melt to proper artery clogging thicknesses).

While the sauce will make just about any fish into a tasty masterpiece, proper fish selection will make your experience even more outstanding. Kroger's fish selection was rather limited (HEB should be used for all meat purchasing if in Texas), so I settled on tilapia and cod (it was either that or expensive sea bass). Personally, I hate the flavorless tilapia (specifically bred to not taste like fish for Americans), but I still really enjoyed my tilapia pieces thanks to the hard working sauce. The cod, however, was on an entirely different level as the fish itself stood up to the powerful sauce and held its own. The original recipe calls for the use of sole, flounder or swordfish, so I will be sure to verify the poaching process still works on these the next time I'm craving fish. Overall, I have to declare wine-poaching to be a giant success as the unbelievably simple and fast procedure perfectly cooked our meal while we watched sports on TV.

Not pictured: the 20 slices of bruschetta we all ate before the meal proper.

Come back soon for the other two equally awesome parts of our grown-up dinner: bruschetta and roasted cauliflower (Ok, I lied. The bruschetta far out awesomes them both) and to learn about Sacha's EMT skills following my finger being introduced to their sharp new knives.