Fail, Fail, Success!

On Thursday afternoon I realized that I had planned on stretching my monthly menu meals a little too thinly this week.  It was a crazy week and I had planned on surfing through the nutty weekend on leftovers, but I hadn't quite planned enough meals to make that work.  Oops, monthly menu fail!

Looking to remedy the situation and also to experiment with a new toy I got for Christmas, I thought I'd set out to make pasta.  I got the pasta plates for my MamaMixer for Christmas.  I thought homemade spaghetti or macaroni would be great and GBaby was giving me a good day so onward to pasta project.  I mixed up same pasta dough recipe that I used when I made the Spinach Linguine except I made it a little dryer and with tomato puree instead of spinach.  I dropped the dough in the dough into the food grinder and waited to see beautiful noodles come forth.  And waited.  And then watched noodles come out and promptly join and stick to all the other noodles coming out of the extrusion plate.  I tried adding more flour to  the dough.  Didn't work.  I tried a different plate.  That didn't work either.  Finally I gave up, vowing to tackle it another day when I had a bit more energy and had done a bit more research.  Pasta fail.

I stood in the kitchen looking at the pile of dough that wasn't going to work for extrusion pasta and didn't want to waste it.  I added more liquid back into the dough and ran it through the trusty pasta rollers.  Voila: tomato linguine!  Then I needed a sauce.  So I went to the freezer and pulled out a tub of pesto that I had frozen from fresh basil.  I added the pesto to a basic white sauce (flour & butter rue with milk) and we had a delicious dinner of Tomato Linguine with Pesto Cream Sauce!  Pantry/Freezer Challenge Success!