Off to the Grunge Guys weekend this morning - thought I'd get an early start and avoid the traffic.

The most notable news of late is that my pasta machine has died. It started jamming on the widest setting, so we opened it up and found the gears to be basically mangled. It still worked on finer settings but now the rollers are out of alignment so one side comes out thicker than the other and the pasta won't feed properly. This last batch got done but only barely, it took forever and was a real pain.

Sigh... I think it's time to shell out $1600 for this. There are fantastic looking machines in the $5K range but this one already costs more than my first motorcycle! It will take a lot of ravioli to pay for it, but this product seems to be a big hit and with the right equipment it could become quite lucrative. And after hand-cranking 4 kilos of dough yesterday I'm really sore, so I'm not anxious to do that again.

On that vein, do you chefs out there have any suggestions for making numerous 2-pound batches of different forcemeats without such a mess? The cuisinart is a real bottleneck, it's a huge pain cleaning out the results of one batch so as to get on to the next. Bonus if it works for mixing pasta dough as well. It's ironic that my shaping method is now so good that the most mundane parts of ravioli manufacture - mixing and schlepping - are what's dragging it down.

Yes, this is the Pasta That Ate My Life. I hope the Flying Spaghetti Monster looks favorably on my sacrifice. I'm really looking forward to a few days of absolutely nothing.