Making Pasta!

Weird title,ryte? I knowlah but who cares ..it's what happened that counts.On Monday was Yi ping's birthday..Happy Birthday YI PING!! Ashwinee and I had baked cookies for her as her birthday present and from the look of delight and surprise on her face, we could see that we've done a pretty good job. Anyway back to the main issue here, on the exact same day me and a group of friends joined a school trip to Cilantro. What surprised me was te fact that it was located just opposite Giant Supermarket. Too think I've lived so long here in USj but never noticed it before!Anyway, Cilantro was actually a culinary academy which looked pretty impressive based on the presentation we had before our tour.After a pretty quick tour, we were lead to two of the kitchens and was told to divide into two groups. Naturally, I decided to stick with my friends so we ended up choosing the first group and we were lead to the first kitchen. Oh I forgot to mention! Most of the students inthis academy were mostly guys which took us by surprise.we were later told that guys usually were the ones who can stand the heat in the kitchen compared to girls (half-true!)





So back where I stopped..in the first kitchen we were told that we would be making pasta from the start..reali making it from the flour itself!! I so wasn't expecting it. Well, me, Suyi and Ash decided to assign ourselves to this task while Yi Ping and Pei Shen started chopping vegetables for the sauce.It was kinda messy but we suceeded (well,mostly Ash did..since she was the one who did 90% the kneading and making the flour into a proper dough..).It was 'scary' to see Pei shen chopping up the chicken as she was doing it with so much energy and vigorously until the rest of us thought the knife would really fly of her hand and hit one of us..haha...Anyway she did do a pretty good job of chopping the chicken.



Later,we were taught how make the dough into pasta using some kind of machine ( i don't know what's it called). Anyway, I really did help out a lot here. I was turning the machine non-stop to make the dough thinner and thinner while Ash guided the dough through the machine. I gotta tell you, it wasn't easy as it seemed.It was kind of tricky especially when at times the dough was too thick to pass through the rollers in that machine .After a while, Suyi and pei shen came and took over my task asthey too wanted too try it out



I proceededto help yi ping with cooking the sauce for our pasta.After cooking for some time, a delicious smell came wafting up to our noses.We did it! the pasta was divide into five portions and was dipped into the boiling water one portion by one portion with equal time each( i can't remember the exact timing for each..)As each portion came out of the boiling water and was placed on plates, I quickly ladled out the sauce onto the pasta of each plate. Finally, our work was done and we could proceed into eating the pasta we had made and cooked.Yay! It was pretty good for beginners like us but as expected, all of us couldn't finish our pasta as it was too much and eventually,we had to throw the rest away.Aww!Luckily for us, we didn't had t do the washing up because there was a dishwasher there.



The other group in the second kitchen baked buns and me as well as my friends were fortunate enough to sample some as there were plenty of leftovers.Mmm, they tasted good until I wished i had done buns instead of pasta. Oh,well, the pasta experince was fun too.anyway, I really enjoyed myself that day and I sure ended up very full when I got back home.