When there is more time in a week, I really love the process of taking some more time to cook food from scratch. A while back I was was already making pasta from scratch and now it was time to try something different again.
It was time to make and fill some ravioli for a different variety of pasta. A small disclaimer here is that this time I did not make the dough all by myself, but I used some help getting fresh lasagna leaves for thing which are easily found in the supermarket. So you don't use the ones that are rigid, but you need the floured ones for this.
After cutting these into separate piece it was time to fill them with whatever you want them to.
I went for a variety of a filling with grated parmesan cheese, some finely cut ham and a bit of flour in there. With making that kind of a mix (and you don't even need a lot of it) you are ready to fill up the freshly cut lasagna leaves.
It ain't that difficult!
I started with cutting all of the leaves and filling them with the mixture, because then it was easy to see that every one of them had sort of an equal amount of filling in there.
I needed to adjust for a bit because my definition of 'one tablespoon' shift a bit throughout the process as you can see ;)
After the filling of the pasta on the leaves, you just either use a kitchen brush to slightly moisten the edges, or when you dont'have one of those you can also use dip your finger in a cup of water for it and go over the edges.
It doesn't have to be soaked, just a brief touch. This will make the edges stick together really well.
After the edges are moistened you fold over the leaves just once. Take a small fork and with that fork you press the edges together. Because of the moisty edges they will stick to each other and because of the fork you have air tightened them. Also because of the fork you get a cool pattern in there.
After these are all folded and air pressed it looks kind of cool right? As you can see I didn't even do it all super neat, but that really didn't matter in the whole process.
The whole filling and folding took like 5 minutes, so that isn't too bad at all.
Finishing it all off
These guys only needed like 3-4 minutes in boiling water. When you dunk them in, the immediately sink to the bottom of the pan, but once they come floating abck up, it means they are almost ready to take out again.
I made a variety with a pasta sauce with red bell pepper, tomato, garlic and onion in the oven, and tossing that in the blender afterwards to get a decent sauce. Putting them in the oven first will make the tomato and the paprika a lot sweeter in taste, so I do this a lot.
Also adding some aubergine from the oven and finishing it off with fresh basil and more parmesan is just the finishing touch right?
I was very happy with the result of the whole dish. The cool thing to realise is that you can so anything with the ravioli filling. I also really like a ricotta and lemon combination for this, so I guess this will be a next experiment on making a filling. Maybe I will also make the dough from scratch again rolling it out and cutting the leaves from it. That should be doable.
But the sky is the limit in this one. Pasta doesn't have to be boring at all, there are so many options! What is your favorite pasta dish?