As I've started working my way through the cookbook, I've also dived back into Stardew Valley itself for the first time since 2019 or so. Good timing, with the 1.6 update just arriving on Switch. While my wife is a Stardew champion, reaching perfection and logging copious hours in the Expanded mod, I haven't even been to Ginger Island yet.
If, based on this blog, you assumed I was a superfan, I hope you can forgive me. I got through the game's first three years, then did one more to get all four candles from Grandpa's evaluation. But after that, I pivoted to other games.
It's been a lot of fun to return to the game after years away. But I'd forgotten how much little failures are a part of the early game, and how they can add up: Getting to the mine and realizing you forget to clear your inventory, so you either have to dump a bunch of stuff or count the time you spent walking there as a loss. Trying to gift a neighbor their favorite dish, but misclicking and giving them bug meat instead. Falling asleep five steps from your front door. Those things can pile up, putting you behind the curve on your farming, relationship-building, and general game-progression goals.
And for better or for worse, this was the recipe where a series of cascading failures took its toll on my cooking: Spaghetti with Butternut Squash Pasta.
Now, to be clear, this wasn't a total disaster. In the end, everything was edible, and some of the component parts were pretty good. But let's say there were some hiccups along the way--a combination of user error and a couple oddities in the recipe itself.
This was definitely the most involved of the three recipes I've made so far. You make pasta from scratch, plus a mildly complicated mushroom bolognese.
I started with the pasta. I've made pasta before, usually with a lovely Marcato Atlas 150 I got as a gift for officiating a wedding a few years ago (stock photo incoming).
But I've only ever made fettuccine, which as a wider, thicker pasta is relatively easy to handle. This time, I'd be using the base model's tagliolini cutter, which is a little closer to spaghetti.
The pasta dough includes the standard ingredients (egg, flour, etc.) and one nonstandard addition: butternut squash, which you roast before pureeing and incorporating it into the dough.
The dough came out nicely and went into the fridge to chill.
On to the mushroom bolognese, which is were things started going a bit off the rails. The key ingredient, as the name suggests, is a mixture of white and cremini mushrooms (aka baby bellas). You put those mushrooms into a food processor and chop them to a consistency approximating ground beef.
I'm a mushroom fan, so I was excited for where this was headed. Next, you filled the food processor with a mixture of celery, carrots, and onions. While I think the food processor was the right call for the mushrooms, I'm less certain about the other vegetables. The mushrooms go into a Dutch oven over medium heat for 30 minutes to brown, and that went well enough. Maybe a little on the long side, but there were enough mushrooms that none of them burned--just caramelized, as the recipe calls for.
The other vegetables were a different story. The recipe calls for you to pull out the mushrooms and add the celery/carrot/onion mix to the Dutch oven, cooking them for another 20ish minutes, also over medium heat. Now, I can respect a recipe that doesn't lie about the time required to caramelize onions. But because the heat was so high, the pieces so small from going through the food processor, and the time relatively long, those veggies charred.
I'll take some accountability here: I thought it seemed like an awfully long time to saute over that kind of heat, and I ignored my own instincts on lowering the temperature. But I do think some adjustments to the recipe are in order. First, unless you have good reasons to avoid chopping the vegetables by hand, I'd just use a knife. The finer texture is great for the mushrooms, but I think the other ingredients would have both cooked up better and worked fine as a texture contrast in the final sauce if the pieces were a little bigger. I think there may also just be some missing heat adjustments in the language of the recipe. For instance, a later step with the sauce instructs you to reduce the heat to medium, but the heat's already at medium. Maybe there are spots you should be adjusting things up or down that are left out?
Anyway, I moved forward with the overdone vegetables, taking a quick break to clean some of the burned material off the bottom of the Dutch oven before resuming. I added the remaining ingredients (some aromatics, crushed tomatoes and tomato paste, and wine) and let the sauce simmer while I turned back to the pasta.
I worked the pasta dough into sheets and, as mentioned above, ran those sheets through the tagliolini setting on the Marcato.
Another smaller wrinkle here: the individual noodles didn't separate well as they went through the machine. I'll chalk it up to trying my hand at a thinner pasta for the first time--I think the primary problem is the dough was a little too wet, though it might have also benefited from a longer chill. My advice: don't be worried about incorporating more flour into the dough when you knead it. Especially with the water content of the butternut squash, I suspect more flour would've helped the machine handle and slice the dough more neatly. (I used the recipe's weight measures, so maybe the cup measurements err more on the generous side.)
As you can see, the sheets were more lightly perforated than separated into actual strands, and most of my attempts at further separating one tagliolino mangled some of the others in the process. And yeah, I use an old laundry drying rack when I make pasta. Someday I'll collect all the components necessary to craft one of those nice little tabletop pasta racks. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But ultimately, after the pasta cooked, it came out tasty if not necessarily pretty.
The sauce was less of a victory. I added some sugar to offset the charred taste and the sharp acidity of the wine and tomatoes. But that acidity was a much bigger problem because of my final failure, which was totally my fault: when you add the canned tomatoes to the sauce, you're supposed to add some whole milk as well. In my frantic state after burning the vegetables, I forgot that key ingredient, leaving us with an excessively sharp sauce. I only realized the misstep when I reviewed the recipe the next day to see what went wrong.
The basil plant I'd bought to use for garnish had bit the dust too, so the final product is a little too red and missing a touch of green.
Ultimately, the dish has a ton of promise, but would benefit from more planning and less stress on my part, plus a few minor tweaks to the actual recipe. To wit: (1) a less fine chop on the onions, celery, and carrots, (2) a lower heat when sauteing those vegetables, and (3) a little more flour in the pasta dough, at least if you're going by grams and not cups. And if things go wrong, don't let it make you forget the milk!
Depending on how things go over the rest of the year, I might have to take a second pass at this one when winter returns in the waning months of 2025. Here's hoping I can improve the flavor profile next time around.
