Finally, some homemade pasta!

After over a year in this house, I finally got out the pasta maker that we were given for our wedding and started putting it to good use. I'd forgotten (a) how heavy it was and (b) how easy it was to use (especially after my course with Rosemary Shrager) and within no time I'd turned out some marvellously thin sheets of pasta, to make Sardinian culurzones filled with roasted squash and rosemary. There's still some refining to do - I couldn't get any proper 00 pasta flour, so I had to make the dough with strong bread flour (not ideal), and my shaping of the culurzones left a lot to be desired but it wasn't a bad start for a non-Sardinian.

More outdoor food at the Newcastle Green Festival yesterday - in fact some of the best chocolate and orange cake I've ever tasted, baked with only organic ingredients. All the food at the festival was vegetarian, and mostly organic, and for festival food wasn't extortionately expensive either - around £3 for a spicy beanburger, and £1 for a slice of cake. Nice to see the customers not being exploited for once.