Homemade Ravioli

I'm not a big pasta fan. I tend to find pasta dishes pretty heavy, especially when they're in a rich sauce. After one or two bites, food fatigue begins to set in, and then it's a race to the finish line, if by race I mean a slow, dull crawl and by finish line I mean eating a third of the dish. However, I've always found ravioli really appealing, and feelings about pasta aside, I'm always trying to test out new dishes I haven't tried to make before, and I'd never made pasta from scratch before.



As it turns out, thanks to a great egg-based pasta dough recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, I discovered that pasta dough is actually much simpler to make than it looks. In this case, it's just eggs, flour, EVOO (which is an abbreviation for olive oil that now looks like it belongs in the movie WALL-E), salt, and water. All household staple items! I love recipes that don't require me to shop. So, the recipe is very simple and easy to execute, but I wasn't totally convinced that it would make a great-tasting pasta--especially seeing as I'm such a pasta skeptic already. In order to see how the eventual ravioli would taste, I took a little of the dough and turned it into a basic, flat noodle, and cooked it up. It was actually really good, very rich in eggy flavor, satisfying, and not too heavy.



Next, I prepared a basic pumpkin ravioli filling, with canned pumpkin and ricotta. I don't remember where I found the recipe for this, but make whatever kind of ravioli filling you like--one just like this should be pretty easy to find online. Pumpkin, ricotta, and a beaten egg were the main components of the filling.



With the flavor part of this pasta game all set, I rolled out a thin sheet of pasta dough, wet a fingertip, and made a 9x9 grid of small squares. Resist the urge to play tic-tac-toe with this grid. Instead, plop a teaspoonful of filling in the center of each square. Wow, plop. That's a really unappetizing word.



Carefully place another, similarly-sized sheet of dough on top of your first sheet.



Using your fingers, seal the ravioli with little indentations...



...then cut them into squares.



These ravioli only took 5-6 minutes to cook in boiling water. You can top them with whatever sauce you like, or they're great with just a little olive oil.



Thanks for stopping by Beach City Cooking, and I'll see you all tomorrow for another post. Have a great night, and stay cool!