Adventures in Making Ravioli

I have always loved to cook but since I have been married and had the chance to do it every day for dinner my array of meals has dramatically expanded! I have learned that I loved to cook even more than I thought. Right now I am a stay at home wife while we're in Boise. It gives me a lot of time to spend experimenting with different foods. I've begun straying from recipes and making things my own.

Lately, I have really enjoyed making foods from scratch. It started when I saw a tutorial on Our Best Bites for making your own flour tortillas. I was like, "I could totally do that." Well, it wasn't as easy as I thought. I hate to say I found a better recipe elsewhere when I love this site so much... but I looked it up YouTube and found a very good video for it. They turned out almost perfect! You know how tortillas are supposed to be, well, round? Well, mine weren't quite round... but they sure did taste good! I used them to make taquitos and I ate several just plain... they are way better than store bought tortillas. I am making some quesadillas this week and sadly bought store bought tortillas because I have a cup less flour than I need and I'm definitely not going to buy and whole new sack of flour for less than two weeks left in Boise! Anyway, tangent over. The next time I made something from scratch it was Pierogies filled with mashed potatoes (served with sauerkraut and kielbasa) because the store didn't sell them and I was set on the meal. I was like, "Wow, making pasta isn't as hard as it seems!" So then I decided to try my hand at ravioli.
I wanted a meat filling so, after looking around on the internet a bit, I found one using ground beef, garlic, onion and parmesan cheese. Well, I know I bought an onion but when I went to make the meal there was none to be found. I was very frustrated and had images in my head of it rolling out of a bag into the parking lot of the grocery store and me, none the wiser, walking away and leaving it there behind to be run over... So I made due with what I had. The filling was okay. Next time I think I will make half the batch with a ricotta cheese filling and half with browned Italian sausage, seasonings and fennel seed (an idea I got when we went out to a delicious and authentic pizzeria one night.

The dough is very simple. Mix flour and salt and add a whipped egg yolk.

...but then it wasn't really making a dough. The recipe said to add enough water to make it a stiff dough.

Voilà! It needed to rest for about half an hour after this.

I don't have a pasta machine yet so I had to roll it out with a rolling pin. This is hard work on your arms! I've definitely added a pasta machine and ravioli cutter to my Smith Family Times gift registry for my birthday or Christmas.
I needed to roll it out paper-thin, so that I could see my hand through it.

A lot of people will take one sheet of the rolled out dough, put dollops of filling on it, then put another sheet on and use a ravioli cutter. I don't have one yet so I used an upside jar to cut circles. This took as long or longer as the rolling out!

My meat filling dollops.

Folded over, with the edges crimped. I used an egg yolk to effectively glue the seams together.

Then they boil for 4-5 minutes.

You can freeze these for later use but, since I was just going to use them that evening, I put them in the fridge in a covered container (you don't want them drying out!). As it was, they kind of stuck together. I also wanted to make homemade sauce but couldn't find a recipe that looked good to me. So many of them called for tomato chunks in addition to paste or sauce. I do not like chunky things. Especially tomato. This is why I generally like traditional bean and ground beef chili from a can... too many people make it with chunky tomatoes. I also added some leftover ground beef and seasoning mixture from Our Best Bites.




Here is the finished product on Bryan's plate. I would say it was pretty good but not mouth-watering. It wasn't something I'd look back on and say, "That was so good. I need to make it again." I need to keep experimenting with fillings and sauces and one day maybe it will be so.