some food-prep pics

Below: pasta in the making. When you're rolling out a lump of pasta dough, it tends to get longer and longer. If you're thinking about the length of the noodles you're making, then you'll probably want to split your rolled-out dough in half, at some point, to keep the final noodles from becoming ridiculously long. Despite my having split the dough in half, I was still in for some long-ass noodles. The size of each dough lump was different, though, so in some cases, I didn't need to split anything in half.

Below: spaghetti. My pasta roller is a cheap version that set me back only about $35. You get what you pay for: in my case, this means spaghetti strands that are pretty thick in the raw-dough state. They get even thicker when I boil them, and the strands tend to stick together because the roller doesn't always cut completely through the dough. Peeling the strands apart during the boil takes a bit of patience, but your patience is rewarded with good pasta. The end result is, alas, more like linguine than spaghetti, but I've enjoyed eating the results of my efforts, however puffed-up and malformed they may be.

Below: "birds' nests" of pasta. If you plan to store your pasta, you're probably going to want to freeze it. You're supposed to let the pasta dry out about 15 minutes before you slap it into cold storage, but I found that simply putting the fresh pasta into a Ziploc bag (after dusting it with flour, of course) right away, without the drying period, works fine. Anyway, I was making so much pasta that I had little choice but to let it dry in bird's-nest form before bagging everything up and putting it all in the freezer:

My sauce had been in the freezer a few days, as had the meatballs. Here they are below, thawing overnight. Everything was frozen so solid that I had no fear of quick thawing leading to rotting food, and my confidence was rewarded when I checked the thawed sauce and meat in the morning and smelled absolutely nothing wrong with anything. Gotta say, I'm always proud of the meatballs I make. As I've written before, I don't use the classic egg-and-bread-crumb binders; I use only cheese to keep the meatballs as proteinaceous as possible. Works every time, but this time around, I followed a recommendation from Sam the Cooking Guy and added ricotta to the meatball mixture, along with my usual grated parm. Sam suggested doing this as a way to up the moistness of each meatball, and I think he was right: when I ate a test meatball, it was indeed very moist and juicy.

Next up: pics from the luncheon itself.