Sunday, January 16, 2011

homemade ravioli

One of the Christmas presents I received was a book called the Encyclopedia of Cooking. It is a textbook-like cookbooks with tons of pictures and recipes and chapters on everything from sauces, to eggs, to meat, to pasta. One of the recipes that interested me most was homemade ravioli. It looked simple enough, but required a pasta roller. I said a quick Facebook plea for permission to borrow one from someone, anyone and my friend Bethany had one to loan me. Yes!

Next I invited my friend Mandy and her husband over for dinner. I knew Mandy would be totally in to helping make pasta, since she is a great cook. She was thrilled to try it, too. We made the filling first, then made the pasta dough.


Rolling the pasta dough was the tricky part. At first the dough seemed to sticky to roll and was coming apart. We dusted it with a little more flour and it was much more smooth. We rolled out all the dough several times and then started putting the filling on it.



You lay the filling down and then brush egg wash on around the filling. Then you lay another sheet on top and seal around the filling. Then we used a biscuit cutter to cut out the ravioli.


Look at how many ravioli this made! I mean, I think the recipe for the dough ended up making 35 ravioli, and each ravioli had a tablespoon of filling inside. (We used a beef filling with ricotta cheese and parsley.)



Lovely ravioli. Lovely, lovely, lovely. It was pretty tasty, too. I also made two kinds of sauces and we had salad and garlic bread, and apple dumplings for dessert.

It was a fun night and we had a blast cooking. And while I will say I was proud it turned out good and tasty, I probably won't make it again. Frozen ravioli is just as good, and takes much less time. I might make pasta noodles again, but the ravioli is just very time consuming.

I was very proud we made it though and that the experiment was successful! The pictures in the cookbook were very helpful and the pasta recipe was easy, just the assembly of it was difficult.

Is there something difficult that you like to make? Tell me all about it, please!

6 comments:

Alison said...

Great job. Have you ever had pierogy? When we lived in Hawaii, I made homemade pierogy. It took forever and they were tasty, but I'd rather buy the frozen variety. Too. Much. Work.

It looks like you two had lots of fun cooking together.

Bailey's Leaf said...

A few years ago, I made a homemade pumpkin pie from scratch. I looked it up. Here's the proof:

http://baileysleaf.blogspot.com/2008/11/betty-crocker-is-in-house.html

I've bought two pumpkin pie pumpkins since then, but haven't managed to make it without canned pumpkin help since.

What a great time with friends, though. Hooray for you for trying it!

Unknown said...

Wow, yummy and fun! :) The only thing that comes to mind at the moment is two years ago when I skinned a turkey without cutting it into pieces, so that it could cook without any of the fat between the skin and meat. It was a very tricky process, and took me almost half and hour, but I would totally do it again! Yummiest turkey I have ever eaten in my life and now that I've done it once I'm pretty sure I could do it again in about fifteen minutes, with a pair of kitchen shears.

JellyBelly said...

Looks fantastic!!!!

... said...

I'd admire you even attempting it. It does look like a lot of work.

Not for eating, but I make gingerbread houses (not this year) and it takes me about 2-3 days.

Colleen said...

I am impressed! I love to cook and my new year's resolution is always the same "one new recipe a week" I never do anything difficult like homemade ravioli's!!!
I seriously can't think of a difficult thing I make. I really try to keep it simple.