Enter the good life

Pasta

Create your pasta by taking 3/4 cups of flour and putting it on a large wooden cutting board.  Make a hole in the center and drop in 1 egg.  Use a fork to beat the eggs to incorporate the flour.  Do this until you can manually press the dough with your hands.  When the dough is not moist or sticky, cut a piece the size of a golf ball.  Flatten the piece and put it into your roller.  Roll out until it’s the size of pasta you want.  I made linguine.  Use the cutter of your roller, make linguine and hang to dry.  Boil for a very small amount of time.  If you make your pasta and boil right away, then boil for only 30 seconds or so.  Boil your pasta as you want, but to really get a good taste of your work, make sure it’s al dente

Red Sauce

We make a classic Bolognese red sauce by 1 of 2 ways.  1 way is to purchase about 10 roma tomatoes, run them through the food mill to extract the pulp and juice but leave the seeds.  The other way is to purchase 2 cans of Italian-style diced tomatoes.  In extra virgin olive oil, lightly sweat some garlic, carrots, and onions finely chopped.  Then add the tomaotes.  Gently simmer for a while to reduce the liquid.  Add in salt, pepper.  We also add parsley.  The key to a great home-made red sauce is proper ingredients.  Sweet carrots, not overpowering onions, not over cooking the garlic, and the mixture of spices that you like.  Oregano is not part of a base Bolognese red sauce

Grilled shrimp

Nothing can be easier than grilling shrimp.  Soak your skewers while making the red sauce.  Skewer the shrimp so very little skewer is showing.  Preheat the grill to high heat.  Gas would be around 400º-450.  Put some foil on the grill where there will be exposed skewer so it won’t burn.  Grill about 3 minutes a side

During the whole time, steam your vegetables.  Mine was freshly cut green beans.

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We had planted grass in the middle 1/3 of our yard just a few days prior to today’s rain.  At first we thought it would be a nice gully-washer and fun to watch.  After some time we decided that it would not be fun to watch.  After we saw our back patio turn into a pool and start to flood our garage, we were not happy.  When we saw our grass wash away, I was a bit upset

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Most of Homer’s popular phrases.  Not a definitive list, but a good list nonetheless

Creating a lawn from absolutely nothing in a desert turns out to be easier than we thought.  We’re lucky cause we have a lot of shade from some larger trees, which holds the water in the ground better than if we didn’t have those trees.

The first 3 pictures are the unfortunate consequence of a large number of baby grasshoppers feeding.  The bare soil is the result of us reseeding where they ate out grass.  We saw the damage the following day.  I am amazed at how much little grasshoppers can eat in 1 day…..

The last 2 pics are of our grass close up.  The grass is 1 month old.

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Here’s a pic & vid from our trip to the VLA.  We went July 5th.

Here’s the VLA website

Here’s the wikipedia article

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