Hospital Food

About 8 months ago I tried a recipe called Ricotta Spinach Rollatini which was made by Giada.  It looked so easy and so good while I was watching the show, so I decided to give it a try.  It called for prosciutto which I had to go to the store to buy and was the only thing I didn't have that I needed...I thought.

If you have never used prosciutto...I wouldn't recommend it.  It comes in really really really thin slices that you have to peel off a piece of plastic, and by the time you get it all peeled off, it is like a sticky ball of goo sitting there on the plate.  The directions tell you to slice it and dice it, which wasn't working out for me.  It was a sticky pile of goo that I tried to pry apart and mix in the filling one slice at a time.

I finally moved on to the next section which was rolling out the pasta dough, filling it with the filling, jelly rolling, and pinching the ends.  Then I remembered that I was supposed to have cheesecloth and twine (which I did NOT have)...oh crap!!!

I ran and got my laptop and looked up substitutions for cheesecloth and found that you could use gauze.  So I ran to the bathroom where I found a package of SMALL gauze patches...the pasta rolls are not small.  I opened the package and thought that if I unfolded them (and took the weird paper out from between) then it made about a 4"by 6" strip.  I figured if I used two for each it would be perfect.

I didn't have twine, so I decided I would substitute heavy cotton thread.  Lets just say that I was cussing a blue streak by the time I got the thread around them because white gauze and white thread makes for a bad eye strain.  Not to mention the two gauze strips were not big enough causing the middle to be exposed!!  I ended up having gauze, which I wrapped in coffee filters, which I wrapped with thread.  It looked like a leg that I had severed with the thread.

While they were boiling I noticed a kind of hospital smell which I hoped nobody else noticed, because by God that is what was for dinner after the trouble it caused me!!!!  Once it boiled for 20 minutes I took them out and immediately took the wrappings off my mangled pasta rolls.

I was so grossed out by the medical smell and the severed leg thought in my mind that I could only eat a couple.  Everyone else who ate them thought they were great...hehe, little did they know.  I was literally in the kitchen for two hours!! I am a quick or easy kind of gal. I have actually made it a couple more times but only used coffee filters and it turns out fine.  Give it a try!!