Terrie asked me to write about our adventures in cooking in the new kitchen, what it’s like to share space with her now that our renovation makes that less difficult, and specifically this fabulous Italian meal that we made together on a recent Sunday.

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But as a starting point, I want to share a little about how this came to be our house. I actually moved into this house on Sept. 30, 2006. It was amid divorce—and I’d found the house, a three-bed, two-bath ranch with a bonus “loft” room—while searching with my daughter as we looked for a place zoned for the high school she wanted to attend two years hence. This was my fifth house as an adult. I’d lived in each of the others for about five years. When I moved into this one, I was thinking it would be the shortest of all, two or three years before I figured out what I wanted to do long term and would be on the move again.

Yet here I stayed, largely because I liked Winston-Salem and when my newspaper job went away in early 2011, I didn’t feel like chasing journalism anymore. I guess I felt I had accomplished what I wanted to, and I didn’t need the disruption of uprooting to find a job in a profession that was constantly shedding jobs, especially of veteran editors like myself who were paid more. So I left journalism and wound up taking communications/marketing jobs, and through two of those, as well as graduate school for my new chosen profession (clinical mental health counseling), I stayed.

Through the growing relationship with Terrie, who moved in Thanksgiving 2016, I stayed.

We began to look for an “our house,” but everything we looked at was either too expensive or didn’t have the yard or neighborhood that would allow our pets the freedom to be outside. Once we decided this is the home where we would make our stand, the decision to fix the major things was easy. First, last spring, was a new roof. Next up was the kitchen, and, having built a house and having remodeled another house (including, principally, the kitchen), I felt confident that we would get what we both desired—more confident, perhaps, than Terrie was at first.

So now it’s done. And it is, indeed, beautiful, as you have seen in some of Terrie’s posts to date. If you missed it, you’ll want to circle back and check out the big reveal of our new kitchen. Although we have frequently been in the kitchen together (that was the point, after all, behind much of the work), this meal was the first collaborative dish we’ve made in the new kitchen. And I had the “lead” role for this meal, doing something I love to do—cook Italian food. I suggested this meal to Terrie because I knew we had a good amount of leftover Italian sausage in the refrigerator from the Sausage and Cherry Pepper Pizza we’d recently made (it has been in hot rotation since our trip to New Haven).

One of the things I’ve learned to do during my seven years total with Terrie is pick up techniques that make a meal better. I love how she can elevate a meal, and though I am sometimes timid to try some of the more advanced techniques, I don’t mind an occasional foray into the unknown (for me). So the main thing I did differently this time was to use Terrie’s immersion blender (I guess by now I should call that “our” immersion blender) to smooth the sauce. But you can get all the details below in the recipe portion. My big share is about how the new kitchen works as a shared space during a meal we prepare together. My point of view is that the day went swimmingly.

I had the primary two stations on either side of the stove as I went from prepping vegetables and sauté work on the right of the stove to prepping and cooking the sausages and meatballs on the left. All the while I was working, and it was about 90 minutes, Terrie was at her new baking station in the bistro section of the room, preparing the homemade pasta, using tools of her trade that worked better in the new space (especially a larger overhanging ledge to clamp her pasta machine, as well as the maple surface).

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We didn’t get in each other’s way once! Now, I will say that as we keep working, we’ll be closer together, but the new kitchen takes care of that, too. If Terrie works the two stations on either side of the stove, I have a nice new long station on the left side of our kitchen sink, available thanks to some minor re-arranging of space in the room. With taller, roomier cabinets, we’ve been able to de-clutter the countertops, thus creating the three clearly defined workspaces, which doesn’t even include the baking station, in effect a fourth workspace.

I’m looking forward to many other dual-prepared meals, as well as my typical role of sous chef, aide and kibitzer-in-chief; I now fulfill the latter role from my perch at our new bistro table next to the baking station.

Next up in transforming this house I’ve lived in since 2006 into “our house?” The master bath remodel, on tap for a March start. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the post about us cooking together there. But trust me, we will.

We’re staying.

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Les’s Italian Sauce with Sausage and Meatballs

The ingredients and steps are all listed in the PDF Terrie has attached at the end of the post, but we hope you enjoy seeing our adventure.

I’ve seen Terrie use an immersion blender on everything from soups to mac and cheese sauces. I decided to try it here, and processed my Italian sauce until smooth. I had vegetable stock on hand to help with blending the thick sauce. Then, I added the cooked meatballs and sausage to the pot and simmered until the pasta was ready.

Any kind of long pasta would be great with this sauce, but we enjoyed it on Terrie’s handmade pasta. This was her first experience with making pasta in the new baking station. The rest of this story is hers.

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Terrie’s Roasted Garlic Pasta Dough

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Of all the foods I make from scratch, handmade pasta is one of the most rewarding. As with so many things that once seemed intimidating to me, this is all about practice and repetition, and once you develop a feel for it, store-bought pasta loses its appeal. Besides the cool factor of DIY-ing this versatile food, I find it deeply therapeutic to transform flour, water and egg into a dough that can be stretched so thin and turned into noodles, all under my own hand. It’s awesome, and having a dedicated space in our new kitchen makes it even better.

I like to add fun flavors to my standard pasta dough, and this time I went for roasted garlic, blended right into the dough to complement Les’s rich Italian sauce. If you are already making your own pasta, I hope you find the roasted garlic a tasty addition. If you aren’t, or if you’re new to the process of pasta making, I encourage you to check out my posts for lemon-herb pasta or spinach-ricotta ravioli, as I offer more in-depth instruction there for making and working the dough. This time, I’m focusing mainly on the flavor and formula.

To infuse the roasted garlic into the dough, I pureed it together with egg and water, then pressed it through a small mesh strainer to keep the chunky solids from messing up the dough. I strengthened the dough by rolling it through my pasta machine, as usual, but used a chitarra for the first time to cut the dough into strands. Here’s how it went!

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Putting it all together

Time for dinner! The sauce was quietly simmering on the stove, so the timing was dependent on the pasta. Fresh, handmade pasta cooks much more quickly than dried, store-bought, so it’s best to have everything you need for serving lined up and ready to go before you begin.

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