Mr EP and I have been doing this alphabet dating thing for a year and a half now, and its been great fun! We take it in turns drawing random letters, so we never know what’s coming next, and one of us plans a secret date starting with that letter for the other person. So far we’ve had M (meal and moonlight walk), Z (Zirka Circus), Y (wanted to do yum cha but couldn’t find one, so we settled with another restaurant and played Y games instead), K (Keystone Restaurant), and Q (quesadillas and Buzz quiz games).
This time I drew the letter P. My initial idea was to go out for a picnic to the gardens, but waiting for a nice enough day when we both had some free time was looking to be too far in the future! When we were lucky enough to get a pancake/crepiere set as an engagement present, as well as enough store vouchers to buy ourselves a pasta machine, I had to put them to good use!
We used this MasterChef NZ recipe, although I halved it just to try it out – turned out to be a perfect amount for just the two of us. We rolled the pasta out to setting 5 on the machine, though we’ve since tried it to setting 4 and it proved to be much better.
We had to leave the pasta to rest until it had dried out a bit, so we had a starter of homemade pumpkin soup while we waited. I also whipped up a quick basil pesto to serve with the pasta… second time was a charm – the first time I heated it too long in the microwave, and cooked it solid! The second time I just left it cold, and it heated up when mixed with the hot pasta.
Result: Absolutely amazing! Such a different taste to store-bought pasta, and incredibly easy to make. We then made amazing pancake-crepes for dessert, served with lots of maple syrup.
A perfect P dinner date with pumpkin soup, pesto pasta and pancakes! (I wanted to watch ‘Pride and Prejudice’ to top it off, but couldn’t get away with that one…)
Our next date is J…. I think Mr EP has a Japanese theme in mind – stay tuned!
Musical Butterfly 