Somedays, It Just All Goes Sideways...

Ever have one of those days in the kitchen where absolutely nothing goes right? I had one of those days today.

To be sure, I was very ambitious today...Susan wanted manicotti, and since that's a pretty simple dish to make (using this awesome recipe from Cook's Illustrated), I decided to get a little nutty and make some other stuff, too.

First, I decided to make bread. I set a sponge, although I knew I wouldn't have much time to let it sit. It was mainly an experiment to see if it would make much difference to my bread, so I mixed a cup of flour, a cup of water, 1/4 teaspoon of sugar, and one packet of rapid-rise yeast. I covered that with plastic wrap, and put it in the sun to sit for a while.

With that done, I headed to the store to get the stuff for manicotti. This is where things started to go awry. The Cook's Illustrated manicotti recipe calls for using no-boil lasagna noodles instead of tubes, which works out great...no trying to stuff tubes of slippery pasta, just slather some filling on a lasagna a noodle and roll it up. You let the no-boil noodles sit in almost boiling water for five minutes, then let them cool, and they are perfectly pliable and easy to use. However, the store didn't have the normal Barilla noodles, but these really thick noodles that said they were no-cook noodles. I grabbed 'em and headed for home.

I had also decided to make my own ricotta cheese instead of relying on store bought (although I did get an emergency backup tub of ricotta). Earlier this year I had made Indian Paneer cheese, and it had been pretty easy, so I figured it would be simple to make ricotta.

I got home and poured a gallon of milk into a large stockpot, and set it on medium high. I also juiced some lemons for curdling the milk at the appropriate time. I got the milk hot, and poured in the lemon juice, and stirred. And stirred. Nothing...no curds at all. Crap...is it too cool? I jacked the heat up. Seeing as how I needed to get my bread dough going, I asked Susan to help out while I mixed my sponge with some more flour and water. Susan stirred, and stirred, and started getting tiny little curds.

I finished up the bread dough and got that rising, and then back to the ricotta. What was only supposed to take 1-2 minutes was taking forever. Susan got the milk near boiling, and then stopped stirring. Now large curds started appearing. We poured the mixture into a cheese-cloth lined colander, and let it sit. The recipe said to just let it go for a minute to keep the ricotta creamy, but it looked really watery, so I turned my attention to other things.

Well, that was a mistake, because when I came back to it, it was really thick...much thicker than ricotta normally looks. I popped it into a container anyway, and slid it into the fridge to cool. With that, I needed to start going on the sauce and the noodles, and form the bread into loaves so it could rise. I got that done, and started preparing the sauce while Susan got going on the filling. I also got some water boiling to par-boil the lasagna noodles.

After my baking stone was nice and hot (500F for about 30 minutes), I slashed my nicely risen bread loaves and slide them into the hot oven. I tossed in a cup of water into the oven for some steam for a nice crust, and then turned back to the noodles. I poured the water into a baking dish, and then slide the noodles into it. The noodles were really thick, but I figured that since they were no-boil, they would be fine. I pulled a noodle out and laid it on a towel to dry a bit, and noticed that it felt stiff still. I tryed to roll it, and it snapped...not pliable at all. Crap. I let the noodles sit for a bit longer in the water, and then pulled one out. Now they were pliable, but when I bit into one, it was totally raw in the middle and inedible. Not good. I put a large stock pot full of water on the stove, and figured I would try and boil them a bit longer.

Susan started making the filling for the manicotti, and after checking out the store bought ricotta with the homemade stuff, decided that the homemade ricotta was just fine. It hadn't really gotten too thick after all, and really tasted better than the tub of ricotta from the store.

I figured it was time to check my bread by this time, and they were....turning black?? What the? Oh snap...the oven was still at 500F, not the 400F the bread should cook at. I quickly turned the oven down, and covered the bread with foil, and checked my watch. I decided to yank the bread out at the 30 minute mark, rather then the 40 minutes they normally take.

Back to the noodles...my water was boiling, so I figured I'd grab some noodles and boil them for a bit, around 2-3 minutes, just to make sure that they were edible. I grabbed some noodles, and...they were all stuck together after sitting in the water too long. Dang it!! OK, I was done with these stinkin' noodles. I started a new batch of water and asked Susan what she wanted...penne or farfalle. Instead of rolling up the filling, I was going to just mix the filling with the pasta in the baking dish, pour the sauce on top, and then cover with Parmesan.

Well, I had earlier pulled my bread, and let it cool a bit. Despite the temperature mix up, it looked pretty good. I sawed off a piece, buttered it, and gave it to Susan. I make myself a piece, and took a bite. I instantly realized something was not right...it was strangely bland. What on earth?? I had thought I would get more flavor from the sponge...what had gone wrong? I asked Susan...she agreed it was a little bland. I started going over in my head how I had made the dough, and that's when it hit me...no salt. I had never added salt to my dough. Adding a sprinkling of sea salt to the top helped, and added a nice crunch, but that was the last straw. I had been in the kitchen from 2:30 until 6:30, and nothing had gone right.

Fortunately, the farfallicotti turned out pretty good...it tasted just like manicotti, so dinner was still good despite the lasagna noodle debacle. Still pissed about the bread, though....