Fun with kitchen gadgets

I look like I'm having fun, don't I ? And I was having even more fun eating the delicious noodles that came out of this funky looking contraption that my SO brought back with him from Germany. In case you haven't guessed, this is a spaetzle maker. When my SO lived in Berlin there was this delicious spaetzle place right down the street from his apartment where you could get these noodles with cheese and onions, sort of like a German mac and cheese. As soon as I was confident that I could pronounce "kaese" and "spaetzle" well enough to be understood, I went to that shop as many times as I could without risking total cheese overload. For around 4 euros, you could get a tiny salad and a giant plate of fresh, cheesy noodles covered in sauteed onions. Delish.

I wasn't at all confident that we'd be able to reproduce that noodle goodness here at home, because spaetzle making seems to be something that there's a lot of lore and mysticism about -- no one will tell you how much water to add to the recipe, for example, so you just have to guess at when you've made the dough thin enough that you can actually get it through the press but not so runny that you just end up with sad little disintegrating blobs on the other side. Somehow, magically, we managed to produce noodles on the first try. It was fantastic watching those long strings of dough hit the water and become delicious lumpy noodles! I had fresh ones for dinner with some cheese, onions and mushrooms on top (my SO tells me that my addition of mushrooms is decidedly NOT Swabian. Whatever, it was really tasty). The next day I made the leftovers with more onions and cheese in a pan so that the noodles got a little crispy and the cheese got nice and melty.

In addition to how surprisingly easy this was to make, I was also surprised at how not nutritionally terrifying the recipe was, for the dough at least. I thought I was going to discover that I'd actually been eating four eggs in a serving with a little pinch of flour to bind them together. For this batch I only used two eggs and a cup of flour, which sounds pretty reasonable to me for two meals (at least until you start dumping loads of cheese and onions in, but so be it. I'm no stranger to loads of cheese and onions). Do you think the Germans just like to keep us thinking that this stuff is terrible for you and impossible to make anyway so that they can have all the noodles themselves? Your secret is out, Germans!