The Pursuit Of Happiness: Week In Review

6/18/2016 tringel 0 Comments

Saturday (299)
What an event (read: full day process of trial and error and experimenting) ravioli making can be. About six months ago, my cousin Rachel and I both bought kitchenmaid attachment ravioli makers on super sale to make our homemade pasta making more creative and easy. Fast forward to this week. Both of our attachments were still sitting pretty and untouched in the unopened box they came in. Each time I walk into my kitchen, it stares at me. And, thus I was determined to use it. So I invited Rachel over to finally make us of one of our ravioli attachments. And it worked...okay. But the overall result was fantastic.

We decided to make butternut squash & gorgonzola ravioli, using homemade pasta dough. In the end it was good life choice, but we had some extreme doubts as we went through the process. Unbelievably, it has been almost a year since I last made homemade pasta, so my dough making game was a bit off. Rachel and I had to make two batches of dough before we got it right (note to self: mixing all of the different excess flours you have leftover in your pantry is not always the smartest of ideas). Our good batch use pasta flour, solely.



It's also good to read the recipe and directions a few times before beginning the process. We started at 4 pm thinking it would be ready in time for dinner. Little did we know, our dinner that night would be at 9:30 pm. Maybe this means I should move to Spain, that's how they do it over there I'm told, and  could go for siestas everyday. Since we didn't pre-read the recipe, we didn't pick the best order to do things, leaving us waiting for our dough to rest for at least 30 minutes at the same time we just put our butternut squash in the oven to roast for 45 minutes.

Once the squash was roasted and cooled, the filling came together as easy as "1, 2, 3," leaving us to roll out our rested pasta dough...with no rolling pin (I had forgotten ours cracked, leaving it for the trash a month or so ago). We made quick use of a wine bottle and the pasta roller attachments as we tried for form our dough into perfect sheets. Then came the trial and error with the ravioli attachment. Once we figured it our, it was actually quite mesmerizing to watch the little ravioli pockets get filled and formed. Again, we didn't read where it said to let the ravioli dry out a bit before separating. At this point we decided to take a dog break -- I had to go visit the dog I was dog sitting for, and Rachel her own dog.


When we reconvened, at now 8 pm, we were feeling hopeful and hungry. I got to work filling the rest of our pasta dough. We then worked on the sauce and boiled water to cook the ravioli as the pasta dried a bit more. I excitedly went to separate the ravioli, and rip. They were not tearing on the perforation; the filling was squeezing out; this was going to be a long delicate process. And now, it was already after 9 pm. We used some quick thinking and whipped out the pizza cutter, making quick, swift cuts between each ravioli. They didn't have the pretty zigzagged edges they were supposed to, but they were whole ravioli and it wasted less dough. Drop into the boiling water, add three minutes later (read five hours later in actuality) we had warm, fresh, homemade ravioli with homemade filling and homemade sauce. And, omg was it good. All of the flavors went together so much more perfectly then I even imagined. And it made a ton of ravioli! Sitting, devouring my plate of ravioli at 9:30 pm made the those 5+ hours of hard work totally worth. Plus I can't complain about the company; really the ravioli turning out well was just a bonus.

Sunday (300)