Week 9

Day 1 of Week 9 had Chef demonstrating how to make pasta from scratch! Not only was it cool to learn, it was also delicious. If I’m remembering correctly, he made a garlic, red pepper fettuccine dish. Straight carbs, but it was delicious.

The process starts with two important steps; making a dry kit and a wet kit. as is more than likely self-explanatory, one kit has all of the dry ingredients in it, such as flour, salt and so on, as the other has all of the wet ingredients, meaning eggs and oil. Start by placing the dry kit ingredients into a large, metal mixing bowl. Create a crater in the middle of the ingredients so that you can see the bottom of bowl, then add all of the wet ingredients into that crater. Mix the wet ingredients carefully into the dry ingredients, slowly eroding away the dry “beaches” into the mix. Finish mixing and kneading by hand to create elasticity in the dough, adding flour as needed to get the correct consistency.

Place the dough in plastic wrap and then in the refrigerator for an hour or so. Then it’s time to roll it out. A picture of the tool used to roll out the dough into a thin slab is below. Attach the pasta cutter after having gone through all of the five settings on the roller, and voila! Pasta. Super cool. Tastes better than the box stuff too.

Day 2 was another day without Chef, so the class used it as a pre-prep day for event week. I have no pictures from this day, I’m sorry to say. But, most of the pasta was prepped on this day and I helped to facilitate the majority of the final tweaks that would be needed for the following week. Hopefully our pasta event goes well! I’m excited and hopeful that it will. Some people are putting in a lot of effort while others are not. What’s new.

My AHA Moment

My AHA moment for this week is that you can only motivate people to do as much as they are going to be willing to do. At the end of the day, I am only responsible for the efforts and actions that I have put into improving myself and my surroundings. I can’t control other people. Perhaps this AHA moment sounds very similar to another one in the past, but it is a key idea of which I need constant reminding. There are going to be some people who try their best at everything that they do, and there are others who put in what is minimally necessary to get by, and I need to come to terms with the latter of the two personalities. Not everyone is going to go above and beyond the call of duty to get things done. So be it.