culinary quest: roman lasagna

Italian food is AWESOME. After eating mind-blowing pasta in Italy we decided it would be fun (and hopefully delicious) to start playing around with making our own pasta. Brandon's mom got us a pasta maker and we started experimenting! (More on that later).

This week we attempted to recreate the melt-in-your-mouth lasagna we had in Rome. Our friend Kevin recommended a hole-in-the-wall, didn't-even-have-a-sign, restaurant called Alfredo e Ada. Thank you, Kevin! It is a two person operation, Alfredo runs the front, and is the waiter, while Ada runs the kitchen (are they a couple? related? not sure). They have only a few primi piatti options each night and a big tapped barrel of house wine. It's so tiny inside that I couldn't really get a picture. The food was fabulous and when we had decided to forego dessert (in favor of gelato on the way home) Alfredo brought it to us anyway, on the house.

We had a little Rome reunion the other night and tried to recreate their "con carne" lasagna. Brandon baked a from-scratch ragu sauce for hours in preparation. We rolled out the pasta and assembled the lasagna together.

Alfredo e Ada's lasagna had about 8 layers of thin pasta, meaty sauce and cheese. That was it. It baffles me how Italian food which is so simply made from very few ingredients explodes with so much flavor.

The lasagna was delicious, and had the same melt-in-your-mouth quality much due to the homemade and not pre-cooked pasta. The sauce wasn't the same flavor as its Roman original, but it was really good. We decided to do even more layers next time and to add more tomato to the sauce. Luke brought us malt dregs from Balcones Distillery to enjoy as a digestif. We then watched old videos, one Luke made during college, one (a VHS!) of Brandon wrestling in middle school (!!!), and our wedding video! Fun times were had by all.