Friday Five – Festivities, Failures, and New Favorites

1) Failure: Homemade pasta, take two.  This thing looks so innocent.  But it tricks you in to thinking it’s oh-so-simple and quick to make your own pasta.  The pumpkin ravioli I used it for turned out to be pretty tasty, but the spinach variation I tried this week was not so successful.

After an hour of dough making, rolling, cutting…

And drying (classy, right?)…

I had sub-par spinach pasta.  The sauce (white cheddar) was delicious, but I need to just stop channeling the little old Italian grandmother I never had and buy pasta next time.

2) Festivities – My boss’s baby shower!

She’s having twin girls!  So much good food and “ooh”ing and “aww”ing over pink gifts.  Definitely made it a fun work week!

3) (New) Favorite Taco Place – A new, simple restaurant called Smoke that my brother and I tried the other night.  A couple from Texas opened it and they make their tortillas, sauces, and other menu items from scratch.  We had the best mac and cheese ever (which I heard is even more amazing with their house made bacon) – with roasted garlic, shallots, mascarpone, and white cheddar, it puts all other mac and cheese to shame.

I had the veggie taco: black beans, roasted poblano and corn relish, crispy potatoes and chili de arbol sauce – with the optional addition of avocado cream.  It was pretty spicy so the avocado helped to cool it down a bit!

My brother tried two meat tacos: one with pork (apricot habanero and caramelized onions) and one breakfast taco with chorizo.  The food was inexpensive, the service was great, and the simple presentation (and bad lighting!) didn’t matter since the food was phenomenal.

4) Festive –  one of the “trees” in downtown Pittsburgh, captured on my way to work (no it’s not the middle of the night, just really early!).

Office-made peppermint hot chocolate – candy cane tea and instant hot cocoa.  Not too bad when you can’t get away from your desk to run to Starbucks.

5) Failure – A new cookie recipe.  They looked pretty before going in to the oven – and the dough tasted okay…

But they got too puffy and somehow developed a really salty taste after baking.  It’s hard to waste chocolate in any form, but these just were not edible.  No worries, I pinned about 329850943 cookie recipes this week.

Your turn!  Tell me about a new favorite, festivity, or failure you experienced this week! 

Have a great weekend!