Hopefully my daughters aren’t reading this because we wanted to surprise them but it’s okay if they do.
Marlo and I were wanting to do more homemade gifts this year but he works as a UPS driver so you can imagine the season is a bit busy lol. I have an old pasta rolling machine my former MIL gave me many years ago and last weekend we made a batch of homemade pasta and then turned that into ravioli with a cheese and spinach filling.
Then I started watching videos lol. Should have done that first! But even those first ones were so good! We had some for lunch that day with just a simple butter and Parmesan cheese sauce. I had bought some stamps because I’ve been watching Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy and saw them on there. They were fun but a lot of work!
I later remembered my MIL had given me a form to make ravioli and dug that out of the pantry. Then I decided to splurge on the KitchenAid pasta maker attachment. Oh my! What a difference! I can make ravioli by myself! With the handcrank machine you need three hands at least but with the KitchenAid attachment you can turn the machine on and guide the pasta through it so much easier with just two hands!
I cooked up some Italian sausage with celery, carrot and onion a la Lidia Bastianich and let it cool, then mixed in drained ricotta, Parmesan and parsley. Cool trick I saw on YouTube was to lay paper towels on a plate and put the ricotta on that, lay more paper towels on top and then press down with something heavy. I used a cast iron skillet.
The first ones were really hard to get out of the mold but as I got better at rolling the pasta thinner AND learned to brush the edges of the dough with water after filling but before laying the second piece of pasta on, then rolling with the rolling pan, the ravioli just popped on out. Further video watching shows people spraying the mold with Pam or dusting with flour but once I rolled the dough thinner and did the water thing they popped out like a prize.
We ran the leftover and scrap pasta through the machine again and then made spaghetti and fettuccine with it. Oh my. So good! Dinner tonight was some fettuccine with tomato sauce, baked radicchio with cream and Parmesan and a few ravioli that split open while we were still learning lol.
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