the pasta dough

Make it with love, is my first tip.  Get into it.  Don’t make it if you’re not in the mood.  Wait for the right time, with the right glass of wine and the right music on.  If you don’t do it this way, you won’t love it as much when you eat it.  Ever hear “You get what you put into it”? Yeah, well that applies here and is my numero uno kitchen rule.

Being Italian through and through, I take my pasta very seriously.  It’s my comfort food, my go-to meal…my family celebrates everything with pasta.   I’m going to have to take it a bit more seriously and get myself a pasta machine and all the proper tools, and when I do, trust me God there will be a huge brag sesh with pictures to back it up.  But, in the meantime, I’ll use my modest hands and lots of flour.

On this particular evening, I used 2 cups of unbleached flour, 3 eggs, a pinch of salt & 1/2 tsp of olive oil.  As shown in the picture above, make a well with your flour, build your walls high enough that the 3 eggs won’t come streaming through.  After you make your well, crack the 3 eggs, add the salt & olive oil.  Use a fork to whip all the ingredients together, slowly incorporating all of the flour into the mix.  Eventually it will look like this:

When you get to the point where you can’t use your fork anymore, get your hands in there and knead the dough with lots of love.  Add flour if it is too sticky.  After about 8 minutes it should look a little something like this:

At this point, wrap it up in plastic wrap and set aside for about 20 minutes.  This 20 minutes is the perfect time to make your filling.  Get creative with your filling,  for some top-notch ideas check out this slideshow. Once your filling is complete, time to unwrap your dough and roll it out.  You will need some flour to keep it from sticking.  This is the point that I realized, “what kind of cook am I, I don’t even have a rolling pin”, so I used an empty wine bottle (I always have one of those hanging around) and promptly got myself to the computer and ordered the damn thang.  Anyhow, be sure to roll out your dough nice and thin; this is where my mistake was, my ravs were a bit too thick this first time around.  Round 2, was much better.

Once you have the dough rolled out, start dolloping your filling onto the dough.  The amount and distance will vary depending on what size your ravioli stamp is.  As I mentioned before, I didn’t own a stamp at the time, I simply cut with a knife.  (I have since purchased one, this is the one I got.) Now you’ll fold the dough over pairing it up with the other side.  Be sure to press down hard to seal it and be sure there are no air bubbles in your work.  Now it’s the fun part, get out your rav stamp (OR knife, in my case) and cut out your ravioli!  You can either freeze them for later use or cook them up fresh right now.  If you are cooking them fresh, they will not take a long time to cook.  You will know they are done when they rise to the surface of your (salted) boiling water Now, was it made with love?  Then cheers, you did it.

spring cooking: bring on the lamb

When the first day of Spring hit this year, I was stumped.  I had lamb ready to cook to properly celebrate, but it was also National Ravioli Day.  I thought to myself, “well, I’ve never had lamb ravioli because I don’t think I was ever given the option to try it” so that’s what I chose to create.  I wanted to gather the flavors of spring and pack them into one square ravioli.  I freestyled the process, as I do with most of my recipes and began by making the dough for pasta.  Listen, I’m no professional, I don’t even have a pasta machine…not even a ravioli stamp but this dough came out great.  More about the dough and its recipe in my next post.  I then headed into my fridge and pulled out a tub of ricotta, a chunk of parmesan, an egg, a lemon, mint and cilantro.  I had picked up a few pounds of lamb shoulder at my butcher (my heart goes boom for lamb lollipops, but they were far too expensive for my pocket that day).  I chopped up 1 cup of mint and 1 cup of cilantro and tossed it into a bowl with 1 cup of ricotta and about 2 cups of freshly grated parmesan.  I squeezed the juice from the lemon, cracked the egg and whipped it all together.  At this point the filling is almost complete.  Next, I chopped up some garlic and threw it into a sauté pan with olive oil on medium heat and placed my lamb shoulders in there, about 5 minutes on each side with a few splashes of dry red wine and a pinch of salt & pepper to taste.  When they were done cooking, I brought them over to my cutting board and chopped them up and whisked them into the ricotta mixture.  Add salt & pepper to taste and voila, you’ve got yourself one bad ass ravioli filling.