Emmy: Ronco pasta maker

Everyone knows that pasta is made with semolina. I wonder why cooks don't say in their cookbooks. Even Mario Batali instructs his readers to use white flour. As does Ron Popeil in his demonstration.

If you add, say, 20% semolina then your pasta will be 20% sturdier. Semolina is also good to add to pizza dough for the same reason.

Obviously your pasta cannot not be al dente unless you allow it to dry and harden. In Italy that's a rather involved process through incrementally diminishing humidity. Or else the pasta breaks. If you just let it dry out in Denver then the noodles shrink too quickly and break.

And if you don't let it dry out to 100% then it grows fuzzy mold when it's stored.

When you use all purpose flour and roll it out, when it's cooked then your noodles are amusingly bouncy. Boing, boing, boing, all over the place. It's fun.

But they are not bouncy when they're rolled and cut with machine that you clamp to a table. Amazon [pasta machine].

At twenty-one years of age there I was eating my spaghetti as you do and my girlfriend cracked up laughing.

At me.

"What's so funny?"

     "The way you are eating spaghetti."

"What's so funny about that?"

     "You are eating it like a child does."

"How's that?" Come on. Gimme a break. I'm eating spaghetti how everyone does, suck the little strands through my kiss-mouth. Everyone eats spaghetti like that. Although it is a bit of a mess.

"How am I supposed to be eating it?" Because I suppose it's time to grow up.

     "You stab some and twirl it in a spoon."

"Oh." What a bummer. There is no fun in that. At. All. Why even have it in strands?