Hey All –

Saturday night was an evening of culinary goodness! Mark and I went over to Danielle and Jesse’s for a fun evening. Danielle decided that we should make homemade pasta – and of course I was totally excited to help her!

Danielle has taken a class in pasta making at Johnson & Wales and on Saturday night we used one of the recipes from the class. We decided to tackle pumpkin tortellini. Danielle made the pasta dough (which is always a gooey mess of fun!). We mixed up our tortellini mixture – pumpkin, goat cheese, pepper and a small pinch of salt. Danielle has a really cool pasta maker, I definitely want to get one! Danielle was in charge of getting our pasta to the right consistency…

and I was sort of in charge of filling up the pasta…

After a while (an hour??) we had two trays full of tortellini – making this pasta was so much more fun, it is a great project for great friends!

We cooked the pasta and Danielle made an amazing cream sauce (with butter, cream and maple syrup!! ) and the final product was pretty amazing. The cream sauce was the perfect pairing with our fresh pasta. I definitely want to make this dinner again sometime soon!

My bowl of fresh pasta and cream sauce:

A tortellini:

You might think that after such a serious dinner project, we might have bought a dessert – but no! We decided to make an amazing raspberry and plum tart / crumble out of Barefoot in Paris. This is one of Danielle’s favorite cookbooks, and I am definitely going to pick up a copy sometime soon. There are so many great recipes in it! We started preparing our dessert after Mark and Jesse cleaned up some of our dinner dishes (they are the best!) 😀

We started off by mixing the fruit, flour and sugar:

Yum. I could have eaten this for dessert – but the end result was soo amazing.

We got to work on making the crumble:

After blending our ingredients together, crumbled more by hand:

We baked our dessert for about 35 minutes and it was beautiful when it came out of the oven:

My bowl with Bryers vanilla ice cream (my favorite ice cream!)

We ended up eating dessert around 11 o’clock. It was such a fun evening of cooking, baking and great friends. I’m exhausted just thinking about it! 🙂 Once again – I must thank Mark and Danielle for their great photography skills 🙂

Well, I’m off – tonight I am watching Olympics (go Bode!) and I feel really well prepared for my week of work. I spent a lot of time cleaning my room, organizing my life, and I am hoping to get my work week started off on the right foot – which means a super early morning. I’ll see ya’ll tomorrow – have a great night!