We had another failure last weekend.  I am on a quest to do something with pasta that has not been done before but that actually tastes good!  I feel that I will have many failures along the way.  This was a failure for 3 reasons: first, the final dish looked gross and we all know we eat with our eyes first.  Second, the things were way too hard to make.  And third, after all that effort they were still only just "OK".  I mean they tasted good, fresh sauce, homemade pasta, and cured Italian meats, how could it be bad?  But the meats were a little too much, it would have been better if they were smaller, thinner tubes with less filling.  Also the goodness to amount of effort ratio was not a good one.  I’m sure if we adjusted this recipe, it could be more delicious, and even look pretty good, but that would take even MORE work and they were already a lot.  I just never think they would be worth the effort.  Because this was a failure, I will not be putting the exact recipes, but they are fairly self explanatory anyways.

The beginnings of sauce.  We made a ton because we needed some for pizza that weekend.

We like to get more Italian tomatoes, but sometimes they don’t have the good kinds.  This brand is actually decent.

Mandi crushing tomatoes

We use a lot of oregano in our pizza sauce

Basil

And a ton of parm as well.

Mandi making the pasta and watching the redsox

We decided to just use meats as the filling.  This was because we didn’t want a ravioli type filling that was too liquid making the spaghetti fragile.   We also did a cheese one as a test.  The cheese one turned out to be the most delicious yet also most ugly.

Jarring up some sauce for the pizzas

Mandi was better than me.

This took longer than we had hoped.

They were kinda fun looking at this point but on the plate…

Ugly.

We weren’t sure what sauce to go with so we tried some cream and some tomato.  Fun night, interesting ideas, not great in the end but we were still full and happy.