I think one of the secrets to a happy marriage is finding something that you can both be passionate about. Something you can both take an interest in and do together as a couple. For us, that passion is good food and good wine!
Before we had kids, we were always trying new restaurants around Austin. The perfect night would include meeting some friends downtown for drinks and great dinner at some trendy little Austin restaurant. However, that is next to impossible to do once you have kids. Sadly, the restaurant that gets the majority of our business....Jason's Deli. Not exactly a five star restaurant, but it's healthy and Presley loves the free ice cream.
Luckily, Blaine and I have discovered over the years that we both love to cook. We soon found out that it was so much more fun to stay home and cook together than go out. We call it "at home date night". After we put the kids to bed, we open a bottle of wine from our collection, make a few appetizers, put on some jazz music, and attempt to cook a restaurant worthy meal. We generally pick something that takes a while to cook so that we can make a whole evening out of it. We don't have to worry about waiting for a table, overpriced menu items, or driving home at the end of the evening. It's the perfect date night and we love it.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned to Blaine that I would love to learn how to make fresh pasta. 3 days later I found a package on the doorstep. Inside was a pasta maker. I knew that our next date night had to include making fresh pasta. So last Saturday, that's exactly what we did. Homemade pasta from scratch!
It's a pretty rustic and messy process. Blaine wanted to make the dough by mixing all the ingredients in the mixer, but I chose to do it the way it's been done for hundreds of years. It was a little harder than I thought it would be and quite the arm workout. However, if 80 year old Italian women can do this on a daily basis, well then so could I! My new goal in life is for people to taste my cooking and swear that I'm Italian.
Into the pasta maker to make the pasta sheets!
Making pasta is hard work, so we had to stop every so often to enjoy some caprese salad (with fresh basil grown in our herb garden) and a beautiful bottle of Sicilian wine.
Time to turn those sheets into spaghetti!
We decided to make spaghetti carbonara. This is one of our go to comfort dinners and it was perfect with the fresh pasta!
Dinner turned out amazing! We will definitely be doing this again soon!!!
And since I can't do a whole post and not show the kids, here are our two favorite reasons for staying home!
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