"People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing - that's why we recommend it daily." - Zig Ziglar

After a week of no motivation whatsoever to workout, I finally found my motivation.  To cook.  Whatever.  According to that quote up there, I'll get new motivation tomorrow.  Let's hope for the healthy kind.

But no kidding, seriously ambitious day of cooking.  My parents gave B a pasta maker for his birthday last weekend.  And while I don't eat a whole lot of pasta in general (no, I'm not on a low carb diet, I just get it from other places), the idea of the freshly made kind sounded pretty delicious today.  And when B offered to make his homemade red sauce?  Sold.

And then, when we were at the grocery store and got googly-eyed over the strawberries, well..... strawberry shortcake it was.

First was making the biscuits.  When I first made this (Valentine's Day this year), I used a scone recipe for the shortcake.  This time, in trying to remember the ingredients with no recipe, I accidentally bought buttermilk instead of the required light cream, so I made buttermilk biscuits instead.  The lack of sweetness in the biscuits was definitely made up by the sweetened whipped cream and strawberries (and possibly by an additional scoop of Haagen Dazs vanilla bean ice cream).

Then we started on the pasta.  I've only done this once before (with Dad), but I think he actually made the dough before I arrived and I just helped with the rolling part, because this was totally unfamiliar.  And hilarious.  We doubled the recipe we found by Mario Batali so that we could freeze some for future use.  And since we didn't have extra large eggs, we used two additional large eggs to make up for it.  Let's just say that our flour well wasn't big enough and we almost had near disaster multiple times at the beginning.  I only got a few pictures because 1) B's hands were moving too quickly to catch all the egg that was oozing everywhere to get many good photos and 2) I was doubled over in laughter with tears streaming down my face.  Thank god he has a good sense of humor, because the doofus in the background on youtube telling us how to "make our pasta come alive!" wasn't helping.

Afterwards, we both admitted that we had considered calling it quits.  Especially when his hands looked like this:

And the dough still looked like:

But suffice it to say, we (B) got our (his) act together and made some damn good pasta.  While it was drying on the rack, he got to work on his homemade bolognese.

And I cut strawberries (there was no counter space left).

Our finished products:

I'd say it was a successful Sunday.  And now I'm off to brush the red wine stains off of my lips before calling it a night.

**Recipes for the fresh pasta and strawberry shortcake can be found on my blog at Chef's Heart and by clicking the links embedded in this post
**Recipe for the homemade pasta sauce will come soon - once I figure out what the heck he did!