InsaneJournal

Damn, that's hard!
Lessons learned:

1. Two people are required for crostoli. Little, thin bits of pressed dough begin to dry out immediately. The time it takes to walk over, pick up a few pieces, cook them, and sugar them is the time it takes a few more pieces to dry. Oh yes.
2. Don't do exercise the day before. If you know you're going to be making pasta, let that be the exercise for the whole week. Post-weight lifting burn is awesome, but does not go well with making pasta.
3. Do not let pasta dough dry out. Or, maybe don't let it freeze. I'm not entirely sure which mine did. An egg and some flour later, it was okay, but shiiiiit, even with that it was hard getting it through the machine for a while.
4. Your pasta maker is not necessarily the same as my pasta maker.
4a. My pasta maker works best if the dough is cut in eighths or sixteenths. That actually works quite well for it. Probably because its largest setting isn't that big.
5. Sugar is awesome. Okay, no, I already knew that, but I wanted to mention it. Mmm. Powdered sugar.
6. Two people are required for making pasta. I suppose that it can be hacked around by not putting much pasta in the machine, see 4a, but... yeah, it's much easier when you don't have to worry about it all clumping up at the bottom or tearing at the top while you're making it. Perhaps a motor would substitute...
7. Clamping your pasta maker to something that can move is better than not clamping it to anything, but... lacks in lateral stability. I guessed that before, but I didn't have much choice.
8. You know, powdered sugar on anything deep fried is delicious. But... mmmmmm... it's even better on thin wafers of delicious pasta dough.
9. VITAMIX DOES NOT MAKE PASTA DOUGH. No it does not. Others say they've made pasta dough with it, and I can only assume they're lying. Pasta dough is heavy. Pasta dough just gets stuck under the blades. It does not form a ball. It just sits there and tries to damage the machine. It doesn't even mix, for goodness' sake... Vitamix makes flour, not dough.

All this leads me to

10. NO WAY CAN I MAKE A PROPER LASAGNA IN THIS KITCHEN, ALONE, WITH THIS EQUIPMENT. NO WAY.

and

11. Should I try anyways? I mean, they did get done, and they are tasty, and it'd be cool to make a lasagna, even if it's not as awesome as one we'd make at home...

Total cooking time: 1 hour dough prep, 1.5 hours fixup and rolling dough, .5 hours cooking. And let's call it fifteen minutes cleaning up...

Damn it, why are my eyes watering... did I get something in them? That'd be just great...