PASTA AND SORBET

I haven't been posting lately do to the trouble my laptop has been experiencing.  My genius engineer, Brandon put a new operating system, hard drive and RAM into the old comp and it's now humming again!

Yesterday I made pasta again with my Kitchenaid mixer but was distracted by a visitor and mixed the wrong amounts of ingredients.  I was supposed to mix one and a half cups of AP unbleached flour with a quarter cup of semolina.  I instead measured a half cup of semolina.  I made my volcano shape with the flour mixture and placed two eggs and a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil into the middle.  I then gently broke and mixed the eggs with a fork and slowly incorporated the flour into the egg and oil until I had formed a ball of dough.  Next the dough was kneaded for a good ten minutes.  It was after this was done that I realized my mistake with the proportions.  I went ahead and cut the dough into spaghetti and dried it anyway.

I prepared my old standby tomato sauce and added mushrooms and fresh basil instead of meat.
 While the sauce was simmering away I took about 2.5 cups of strawberries and threw them into my food processor.  I added a little less than a cup of water and 3 tablespoons of vodka to the berries.  I chopped a handful of fresh mint very fine and chucked that in.  Now all the recipes for sorbet that I've read up till yesterday call for superfine sugar or simple syrup (liquid sugar).  I don't really want to used refined sugar so I substituted raw honey and not really knowing how much honey it takes to produce the sweetness of X amount of sugar, I started with two tablespoons and blended and tasted.  Two was a little dull so I added another.  It tasted good so when the mixture was blended well I poured it through a sieve to remove some of the the little seeds (I don't think it's really necessary for strawberries but I did it anyway).
Just so you know, the vodka is added not for taste but to keep the sorbet from getting rock hard.  The scooping is so much easier!
Charlotte loved the finished sorbet and she really knows her sweets...being from Sweeeeden.

Now, back to the pasta.  I learned that again, recipes don't have to always be precise.  You can look at what you're making and figure out what needs to be added many times and it's all good.   This was the case with the extra semolina.  It did make the mixture a bit drier and when I saw that, I added another egg and voila!  It was perfect.

So don't be afraid to experiment and don't worry about "mistakes"...just do it!   However, if you are baking, disregard all that which I've just written and stick to the recipe. :>)