The biggest waste of my time thus far.

Pasta making. 

Ok, that isn't all true, because making lasagne noodles was fine, I would do that again.  It was making spaghetti and fettucine that was awful.  It may be the limitations of my pasta maker, but being as this is only a year-long experiment, I wasn't about to go out and buy a fancy electric one. 

I decided, for the first few batches to do a somewhat traditional pasta, with eggs and flour.  So, I put a pile of flour on my counter... made a well and dropped in some eggs.

I took a fork, and started mixing it up, gradually bringing more flour into the egg mixture...

Once it was getting stiffer, I just mushed it in with my hands until I got a ball of dough.  This is a very imprecise method.  I did it twice and both balls of dough were completely different.

Foolishly, I thought the smooth one was better, but when it came to actually rolling it out, the lumpy one seemed to go through the machine better (after kneading it a bit more).  I ended up having to knead the smooth one with more flour, otherwise it was too sticky.  I suppose this method works well if you really understand pasta, and know exactly what it should look like, but for a novice, it was too much trial and error.  The subseqent batches I used a recipe:

2c flour

2 eggs

1 tbsp oil

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 c water

and dumped it all into my food processor and ran it until it formed a nice ball.  I found it still needed to have a bit more flour, but you have to knead it with flour anyway.

Rolling it through the machine was fun...  (if by "fun", you mean tedious and annoying).  You push it through the largest setting over and over, folding it up and doing it again,

...until you get a nice smooth noodle.

Then you do it many more times, decreasing the thickness by one step each time.  I got to the 6th of 7 settings and thought that was fine for lasagne.

I spread them out on a floured surface until I was ready to boil them and assemble the lasagnes. 

Where spaghetti and fettucine get annoying, is that you can't just run the dough through the cutters after you've made it thin enough.  It needs to dry out a bit first.  It can't be too soft, (it won't cut through) or too dry, and the edges can't be dryer than the middle, or it'll be a gigantic mess.  Needless to say I did a lot of muttering under my breath before I got enough noodles for 3 meals of spaghetti.  It also took me most of the afternoon and made a mess of my kitchen.

There, I did it once, and I'm not planning on doing it again.  Yes, it does make really cheap pasta (about $1.25 for a double batch which yields more than a box of lasagne noodles), but if you factor in the time and frustration, even fresh-made pasta at the local italian deli is a bargain.

The rest of my day.  3 lasagnes, and 8 meals of spaghetti sauce.  Grand total, under $30 for a minimum of 11 family meals. (it will likely give us some leftovers too).  Under $2.75/meal