The Dough Did What It Wanted

February ninth. The pasta machine has been sitting in the back of a cabinet since I bought it at a kitchen estate sale last fall, one of those things I paid twelve dollars for because it seemed like a reasonable future version of myself would use it. Yesterday I decided the future had arrived, which I announced to no one.

The process took about an hour longer than every video I watched suggested it would. The dough was too stiff, then too wet, then somehow both. The first sheet through the machine came out looking like a topographic map of somewhere mountainous. I kept going anyway because at a certain point the only exit is forward. By the end I had a pile of tagliatelle that was technically tagliatelle, irregular, a little thick in places, dusted in so much flour the whole kitchen smelled like a bakery, but tagliatelle.

concentrated and slightly losing

I boiled it in salted water with a little butter and some black pepper and ate it standing at the stove because the table was still covered in flour. It tasted, fine. More than fine, actually. There was something satisfying about it in the specific way that a thing made entirely by your own hands can be satisfying even when it doesn't look the way it was supposed to. The collapsed bowl on the shelf above the stove watched the whole operation without comment. I thought about how it looked the first time too. I thought about how I kept it anyway.

the finished product. loosely defined.

I will probably try again in a few weeks. The machine is not going back in the cabinet.