Pastamania!

1. Take yourself and 3 friends. Make it one very new friend, one who you usually only see when there's either scrulse, karaoke or bowling involved, and one who has just returned from overseas. Ensure none of them have met before, except via planning emails about Pastamania (although of course, because this is NZ, two of them were at university together and have multitudes of mutual friends). Also make sure everyone shares a borderline obsession with all things culinary and a huge amount of technical skill in the kitchen. Ensure the three females are hungover. Allow the event to be commandeered by the sole-male and give him a nickname which reflects that.

2. Hold the event in the house of the Girl who has No Fancy Kitchen Equipment, and who has somehow managed to have a food blog, all without a microplane, kitchen scales, a mortar and pestle or a decent knife. Try and manage the obvious rage of the Sole Male as he attempts to locate non-existent kitchen basics.

3. Aim to begin at 10am, but don't start cooking until about 2pm. Load up on carbohydrates from the cute little bakery down the road, washed down with plenty of coffee.

4. Take on Moore Wilson's on a rainy Sunday morning. *shudder. Load up on '00' flour and free range eggs. Get your dough recipe sort of sorted. We went especially yolky, and luckily a large amount of the free range eggs we used had double yolks. It was really weird. But sort of helpful.

Fresh Pasta Dough
750g '00' flour
8 egg yolks
2 eggs
A sprinkle of salt
A drizzle of olive oil

Mix up in a bowl with a wooden spoon, and mix into a dough. Roll out onto your bench and knead well. Wrap in glad wrap and keep in the fridge until you need it.

6. Get your meat slow cooking (see below).

7. Get going on the dough and get going on some sauce.

8. Add wine.

9. Aim to make enough fresh pasta to feed 30. After some last minute text messages to some non-RSVPers, be relieved that your numbers are now 16.

10. Assemble the lasagne and get it in the oven.

11. Add more wine.

12. Crank some sweet tunes and get a production line going!

13. In a  flurry of wine fuelled and friend filled fun, serve up 5 courses of fresh pasta.

Farfalle with arabiatta

Farfalle is made by rolling out the sheets of pasta and cutting with one of those roller thingees. Once they're in rectangles you just pinch 'em into bows! The aribiatta is a tomato based chilli and garlic sauce. Serve with parmesan. 

Beetroot Parpadelle with beef shin ragout and gremolata

The pasta dough with the beetroot was made by reducing 1 egg and 1 yolk and instead adding some cooked and pureed beetroot. Parpadelle is thick strips. The ragout was slow cooked - brown the meat and remove from the pan, toast some fennel seeds, add onions, the beef, a bouquet garni, some tinned tomatoes and some stock. Slow cook for a few hours, serve with gremolata sprinkled on top (lemon zest, finely chopped garlic and finely chopped parsley). Divine!  

3 cheese Agnolotti with alfredo sauce

I was not paying attention to either the sauce or the agnolotti. Sorry. (Hey Roddy, how bout a guest post about how to make agnolotti? Please?!)

Roasted chestnut, poached chicken and duck prosciutto tortellini, with white wine and leek reduction

Tortellini is pretty easy. The pasta dough was rolled out and cut into rounds. For the filling we roasted the chestnuts. A chicken breast was poached. Roddy had cured a duck breast, which was thinly sliced and added. That all went in the food processor. The sauce was made with sweating and slow cooking leeks, and adding white wine and cream. It was luscious.

Mushroom and spinach lasagne, with beetroot pasta sheets and blue cheese sauce 

This was quite simply incredible. Nicola advises she made as follows:

I first soaked a jar of cep’s (dried porcini mushrooms)

Sliced thinly some Portobello mushrooms and roasted them with some garlic, thyme and butter till they had leached their liquid....

Sliced the cep’s thinly and sautéed them with some onion and butter – and added some cream, Worcestershire sauce and a little of the liquid from the roasted Portobello’s ... reduced

Made a blue cheese sauce also added a little mushroom liquid...

Put a layer of pasta down I think normal a layer of the cream cep sauce, a layer of Portobello’s, a layer of spinach a layer of blue cheese sauce... a layer of beetroot pasta everything repeated and topped  with parmesan cheese

I'd given up on photography, and had had far too much mulled wine by the time Harriet made chocolate sauce and served it over vanilla ice cream. After all the carbohydrates, cheese and cream, it was a surprisingly refreshing dessert. Which doesn't make sense...but you're just going to have to take my word for it. Thanks to everyone for getting involved!