There's something very satisfying (for me at least) about being able to do or make something from basic parts or ingredients. Maybe it's the whole American self-sufficiency thing, or maybe it's just a deep-seated worry that I couldn't fix the warp engines if something happened to Scotty. Regardless of the psychoanalysis behind it, that's probably the reason that I built electronic kits as a kid, and why I love to make beer and wine and to cook.
This weekend, we decided to make a family favorite, spaghetti and Italian sausages, but to do it (mostly) from scratch. A couple of years ago I bought a meat grinder attachment for our Kitchen Aid mixer, and used it to make breakfast sausage. I had also intended at the time to try Italian sausage, but never got around to it. Well, yesterday was the day. We followed Alton Brown's basic recipe (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/italian-sausage-recipe/index.html) with a few changes. We added 4 or 5 cloves of minced garlic and about 1 heaping tablespoon of crushed red peppers (we like it a little spicy). Then, rather than grind all the fennel seed, we took about 1/2 of it, along with 2 t of whole black peppercorns and ground them up in the spice grinder, adding it along with the remaining whole fennel seeds. After refrigerating the mixture for an hour, we ran it through the grinder and then let it sit for another 3 hours in the fridge.
Rather than stuffing it into casings as I had done with the breakfast sausage, we decided to make sausage meatballs. We used a 2 oz. ice cream scoop and made 18 perfect little meatballs. These were baked on a wire rack inserted into a sheet pan (Good Eats fans know all about this) at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes. They were delicious!
In addition to the meat grinder, I had also bought the pasta extrusion attachment for the mixer and we thought this would be a great time to try it. We used the basic egg noodle recipe that came with the attachment, but didn't sift the flour as called for in the recipe. This resulted in dough that was way too dry. It pretty much stalled the poor mixer during the extrusion, so we decided to start over. Sifting the flour gave us a much better dough, and the extrusion went more smoothly. However, the dough heats up during the extrusion process and we had a terrible time separating out the individual strands of spaghetti. In desperation, we gave up and got out our tried and true hand-cranked pasta machine. It worked like a champ (once we remembered to flour the dough just before cutting it) and we had great thin spaghetti.
Now, you'd expect that we'd also make a wonderful homemade sauce for all of this, but I must admit that we all really like good old Ragu chunky sauce from a jar. I always doctor it up a little (olive oil, crushed garlic, basil, oregano, and anchovy paste), but it's still basically sauce from a jar. We let our sausage meatballs simmer in the sauce for a while, then served it over the pasta. Some bread from Grand Central Bakery and a bottle of Mazzocco Maple Vineyard Zinfandel made the meal complete.
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