Jennifer learns to make pasta, spaghetti in olive oil and butter with garlic

Well huh, I made noodles. 

Yes you did.

Jennifer came over to catch me up but I was already caught up so we made pasta instead. This is breakfast.

Another of these machines is packaged behind her. She is to give that new machine to her boyfriend. 

One of them.

Boyfriends. 

Kidding!

That machine and a bag of semolina flour. Because that's how we're doing it and semolina might be not so easy to find.

He likes to cook. That is all that I know about him. 

I want him to know not to wash this machine in water or else it will definitely rust. And I'd like him to know about durum wheat. 

I showed her how to scoop from both bags of flour equally, spoonful for spoonful, same size heaps, diminishing, half-spoonfuls, and so on to a very dry dough to get 50%/50% intuitively without being scientific about it and without even knowing how much flour is used. 

So we had this session instead. Side by side, hands on. I was able to show Jennifer how dinking around like a little girl differs from smashing hard wheat into an egg to produce dry tough dough by brute persistent determinative masculine force. 

"No, Honey, not like this; dinky dinky dinkity dink, like this; blam shove shove blam, grind, shove, grind, grind, shovegrindgrindgrindgrind, shove. Pat like a little baby."

Wrap and wait. I explained what happens while waiting. Cooks say the dough is resting but the dough is actually quite active. The water evens throughout, and autolyse. Actually the resting dough is very dynamic inside and fifteen minutes later changed to be overly soft. Jennifer holds it and feels the huge difference.

She uses the machine. Learns its idiosyncrasies. 

I showed her how to peel garlic, and how to cut it paper thin like a pro; how to hold her hand like a claw to protect the thumb and push the garlic clove forward while the claw fingers make a wall ending with fingertips that the knife in the other hand slides along and follows as the fingers claw backwards and the clove pushes forward, the knife slicing downward along the fingers-wall so rapidly, so gently along the the finger-wall and so definite and machine-like with slices that some cuts do not even cut anything while the wall-fingers creep backward allowing more chop-able space resulting in a pile of paper-thin garlic slices. It is unnatural. 

So is peeling the paper from garlic. A lot of people do not know, smash the garlic cloves and the paper lifts off as a single separate unit. Tedious. But not so tedious as peeling a garlic clove like an orange. Smash with your hand or with the flat of a chef's knife. So, two garlic-related things right there. A lot of cooking information was transferred beyond understanding the oddities of this machine. 

We had fun.

Then we ate the simplest pasta possible. 

Now, she can give this machine to her boyfriend and know what he is doing and talking about. With some hints from a longtime user about how to advance quickly. 

Atlas. Still the best. From Italy. And competitively it all gets down to the cutters not working on the other ones. And apparently this one is smooth. 

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