default pasta

A wonderful post on Sippity Sup about the rules for "default pasta" really made me think that my boyfriend and I need to be more creative when we make pasta. Up until now we have usually stuck with either tomato sauce or pesto. Unfortunately, the pasta in this post looked so good, that instead of taking the rules for default pasta and applying them ourselves, we ended up making the exact same dish! But don't worry, my boyfriend still found a way to exercise creativity by fashioning a pasta drying rack out of a paper towel roll, some random pottery (why did we even have that in our house?!?!) and chopsticks (see picture to the left).

Despite our best efforts to copy Sippity Sup exactly, we encountered huge issues with our pasta machine when trying to make spaghetti noodles. We aren't really sure what the problem was, since, after getting extremely frustrated and toying with the idea of just using dried pasta, we discovered that we could cut fettuccine noodles just fine. Anyone else have trouble making their own spaghetti noodles? Do we need to do something different with the pasta dough? Is there a secret we don't know about?

We also decided that while vegetarian pasta is just fine, why not sautee some diced salami with the bread crumbs? This was not a mistake!!!

Overall this was a truly delicious pasta dish, and I'm so glad we got around to trying it. Seriously, bread crumbs on pasta? Genius! Thanks Greg, and I promise we'll try to come up with our own default pasta next time...

Fettuccine with ricotta, radicchio, garlic, panko breadcrumbs, salami, parsley, red pepper flakes, olive oil and Parmesan cheese