re: Cannelloni (a photo recipe)

Looks awesome and also something i would do when i retire. lol

The pasta alone is enough to get me excited. How do you keep it from tearing when you’re handling it that much? Thank you for the heartburn later...

Lawd have mercy that looks good.

MD, what pasta maker machine do you recommend ?

Recommended Pasta Machine?

I have no idea. we bought our machine at Bed Bath and Beyond about twelve-fifteen years ago. It is just a hand crank machine. I have laughed a time or two and said we should have bought the one that plugs into the front of our kitchen aid mixer, but we have never taken that plunge. The hand crank machine we own looks a lot like this one:

$19.95 on Amazon)

That one might be it exactly and it does a fine job.

The machine needs to be adjustable, because you start with maybe 1/4 inch thickness and decrease it one click at a time until you get the stuff really thin. The more times you run it through the machine, the more pliable the pasta becomes.

Our machine has blades to cut linguini and the $19.00 machine I linked to also does that.

I don't think it is necessary to buy a really expensive machine unless you are making pasta every day, and we don't.

Semolina Flour vs AP Flour?

I had to go to my resident food expert (the wife MHNBPF) who has a degree in nutrition for this answer.

1 - you can use AP flour and lots of pasta makers do use AP to make their pasta.

2 - Semolina flour is made (milled) from the endosperm - starchy middle part (under the bran) of durum (hard) wheat. The fact that it comes from durum wheat is the reason for the yellow color of semolina.

3 - The semolina layer from soft varieties of wheat will mill out white (not yellow) and technically should be called flour and not semolina.

4 - Durum wheat has more protein than soft wheat (the southern biscuit wheat) and because of protein content, it may have more of a "tooth" than southern soft wheat. It may also process into pasta better because of the higher protein content, but a non expert might not notice that, and an expert may have already worked out sufficient technique so that it makes no difference to them.

5 - AP flour will make good pasta, especially if you do not use the favorite brands of southern (soft) wheat. White Lilley and Martha White brand flour are both Soft wheat and will not make the best AP flour pasta. General Mills and King Arthur AP flours are both Northern wheat which is harder wheat and will make better AP flour pasta that the other two brands I mentioned.

6 - Both General Mills and King Arthur AP flours are not the best choice for southern biscuits or my style of cornbread.


Oh - semolina flour is usually more expensive, because they can charge more for it.

Oh - the Semolina part of corn is where we get Grits, one of my favorite grain foods.

Oh - cooking rice is the semolina of the rice kernel.

Oh - Couscous is the un-milled (only cracked apart) semolina of wheat. That means couscous is sort of like wheat grits.

And that is a lot more information than you asked for.

start to finish:

As I said, this is a lengthy preparation so maybe 2 hours of steady work. Add 15 minutes to that for photographs, because I usually stop to take a few shots and then go back to cooking.

After dinner work to post can take a while because I might take 50 photos while cooking - for this post over a hundred shots. Then, from the comfort of my recliner I sort out and throw away most, leaving 12 - 24 shots to do a post.

I shoot in large file format and then reduce the photo size to somewhere around a 250 KB file size, which works well with Flickr and TD page size. I lose some photo quality by dropping file size down that much, but not a lot.

Writing the recipe steps depends in my photos and fighting my urge to post seven photos of me turning a steak over on the grill to get a cross hatch grill mark. I know too many photos in a recipe gets old quickly.

For this one, I probably had 3 hours invested and a restaurant quality meal that we enjoyed very much, plus leftovers that were just about as good as he first meal.

Why do this? I enjoy it. For years I had a very very high pressure job (corporate quality officer VP in a drug plant R&D/Operations/FDA/OSHA/EPA/DEA Bla Bla Bla. In those years, it was a pressure relief valve to not bring work home with me.

Retired now and still enjoy doing it. I see the kitchen a lot like a Chemistry Lab, where I grew up during my work life. Cooking is a lot like Lab and R&D work.

Both the wife and I are good cooks and we work together very well as a team. The problem we have is we ae hard to impress at a restaurant.

Food looks great but you should've paired it with a better wine.

I don't think I've ever been prouder of a random Internet person

Looks tasty. I am sure the taste was a little different, but I like pasta, so no harm as far as I am concerned.

I do think that the chicken livers add an additional layer of flavor to the dish.



So, would you make it again? That is the important question.