The Ravioli Resolution

Happy New Year! Here we are in January yet again, and before I make resolutions for 2009, I wanted to look back at the culinary resolutions I made for 2008: cook black beans from scratch (done!), learn how to make shrimp etoufee (done!), and make ravioli (...not done), the latter which I'd been avoiding out of sheer laziness and fear of the unknown.

But my mother, who is 99% responsible for all the wonderful things in my kitchen (Global knives, Kitchen Aid mixer, desire to cook at all...) sent me the Kitchen Aid pasta attachment for Christmas, and suddenly I was reminded of my ravioli resolution.

The dust finally settled from our delicious Christmas feast* and the kitchen was looking much too clean, so I decided to muck it up again making ravioli before the year ran out and I had nothing to show for my pasta resolve.

Andy and I decided to do the simplest egg pasta filled with ricotta, and I threw in some spinach and leftover herbs to spice it up a little. We followed the recipe out of the Kitchen Aid manual, which definitely didn't provide enough detail for beginner pasta chefs, but we muddled our way through. I'm pretty sure our dough was too dry and we definitely didn't knead it long enough (the recipe said 2 minutes with the dough hook and 1-2 minutes by hand - is that enough?).

Despite our too-dry dough, once we finally managed to cram it through the pasta wheels, it really transformed itself. The mixer attachment actually does the thinning for you, so what you would have to roll by hand you keep feeding through the machine and folding over on itself until the dough becomes elastic and smooth. I'm sure Andy's Italian grandmother would have not approved of our lazy method though!



Once the dough was kneaded and thinned, you keep setting the rollers thinner and thinner until you get the dough to the right thickness you want it. We put it through five different roller settings, the Kitchen Aid recommendation for ravioli, but next time we'll roll it thinner.

To make the ravioli, you take one long skinny sheet of pasta (mine were misshapen) and plop your filling along the sheet with about 3 inches between each dollop. Then you use water to moisten the edges and press another sheet of pasta on top, forming your raviolis. The final step is to cut them apart with a pizza wheel or pastry cutter.



Luckily, all of my creases were tight enough and no raviolis exploded in the water! We topped them with marinara sauce and Parmesan cheese.

mmmmm....


*For Christmas dinner, I made herb-crusted pork loin, penne gratin, sauteed swiss chard, and orange-ginger carrots, and David and Shana brought a tasty apple tart for dessert. And I made rolls, from scratch! It was a superb dinner.