The Bison Girl :: a lifestyle of good cooking, good eating & living well

Did you know how very easy it is to have your own fresh noodles the next time you want pasta? I sure didn't! I've thought about getting a pasta maker for a long time, but only recently (when I had a Bed Bath & Beyond Gift Card) did I take the plunge. I bought a decent, $35 hand crank pasta roller and cutter which comes included with a spaghetti and linguine attachment.  Let's start with the finished product. I sure do love spaghetti and meatballs! I did a little research, and over the weekend decided I was ready to give it a try! Since I was going to be using homemade noodles, it didn't feel right putting from-the-jar red sauce over my hard work, so I decided to make a homemade sauce as well. Spoiler alert: I have never been able to make a proper red sauce. I don't know why. I have tried many different recipes and I never like them. It must be my lack of Italian blood. But! I did make delicious noodles (for a first try!) as well as awesome B

Okay, so let me start by saying that this post will not have the recipe for the bread I'm going to show you. That wouldn't be fair to the author or publisher -- and quite frankly probably isn't legal. :)  So, if you think this bread looks delicious, you'll either want to find a similar recipe online or find this book (which I highly recommend anyway, for it's plethora of other delicious bread recipes!) Here's the link to it on Amazon. What I will show you, however, is my process in following Reinhart's instructions - my opinions on how easy it was to follow and how my finished recipe turned out! That way, you can see how truly easy bread making can be! Here's a slice of the finished product:

While, I mainly like to keep the focus of this blog to recipes and information about bison meat (as that is my biggest area of expertise...) I do have some other cooking and baking interests and I'm thinking we'll start branching this out a little bit. And today's a good day for it. The whole city is basically shut down, and I've been holed up in my apartment all day, giving me the chance to spend some time working on some projects that have long been on the back burner. *Ahem* ... cleaning my kitchen and organizing the cupboards... *Ahem* My apartment kitchen is quite small for my normal use. (Just the other day I joked with my mother that we could both have a room completely dedicated to kitchen cabinets and still not have enough cupboard space -- and she agreed.) So, taking the time to get that cleared up, has cleared up some of my much too little counter space so I can get back to baking and cooking comfortably! So, I wanted to start a series of posts tha