Being who I am though, I want a festive dreamland send-off. I'm not always happy with just a box of Ronzoni - even in my grogged-out state, I wanna cook. And that means fresh pasta. But it's cold and the Inhaler needs serious nosh to stay warm and conscious for battle. And that, my friends, means fresh ravioli.
When I decided to do this, the book I immediately turned to was a dog-eared, disintegrating favorite of mine, La Cucina di Pasquale: Italian Gourmet Cooking by Pasquale Carpino and Judith Drynan. If you grew up in Southern Ontario in the late 70s and early 80s, you knew Chef Pasquale as the Singing Chef, a Calabrese opera singer who came to Canada, opened a restaurant and quickly garnered fame and TV deals (first cable access, then network) to spread his joy of Italian cooking. And man, that man could cook. I bought his book in my early 20s when I made my first wobbly steps toward eating in the grand Italian style. Many, many books have flowed through my hands over the years, but this one has never once flirted with the cull pile. It's been halfway across the world and looks it. Thank you, Chef P.
He's always had it going on in the ravioli filling department. The three classics are all here: meat, cheese and spinach with ricotta. With an Inhaler in the house I give you one guess about which I chose. Yup. Mooooooo.
A pound of browned ground beef, olive oil, garlic, onions, a couple of eggs, lots of fresh parsley, a splash of Sauvignon Blanc, some homemade soft breadcrumbs (which are covering the meat here) and a smidge of freshly-grated Parm - heaven. I assembled it and tossed it in the fridge to firm up while I made the fresh pasta.
You don't need any gadgets to make fresh pasta, but I like 'em. A lot. Instructions abound for mixtures blended with a wooden spoon, rolled with a rolling pin and cut with a knife. How romantic. A First Nations woman I knew a long time ago told me that I, "have the arms of a bird, eh?" and she wasn't kidding. The wooden spoon and rolling pin jobs here are better left to the burly strong arms of my KitchenAid mixer. Heck, if ya gottem, why not usem?
And why not also use the recipe developed for the mixer? I've used Chef P's recipe for years (I used to recite it in my head to distract me from air sickness) but a glance at this new recipe sold me. You can find it in the most recent little KitchenAid Pasta Maker booklet, available in PDF format here. What's so great about this recipe? For starters, it's been retested and revised over the years. The original recipe in the big stand mixer manual contained 4 eggs and had only oblique instructions. This new one saves you an egg and is much more precise about the balance of eggs to water (and has some superb advice about flour sifting on the previous page). A double recipe of this and Vlad would be amply fuelled for some serious sparring. Game on, I say.
I took great pains to ensure that I had exactly a double recipe's worth of eggs and water:
I added the sifted flour to the mixer bowl and gradually added the egg mixture:
Again my penchant for making puke-like food appears. But wait! There's more!
From gunk:
To gorgeous in three minutes:
After the dough ball snoozed for 25 minutes (I got caught on the phone), it was ready for the guillotine. I attached the pasta maker (yay, bird arms!) and fired 'er up.
Steady feeding of walnut-sized pieces into the grinder body resulted in an even flow of dough.
As the dough emerged, I supported it lightly from beneath to keep it from compressing in a wrinkled mess like plastic wrap does.
Once the pieces were about 12" long, I stopped the machine and cut them off at the extruder. I lovingly draped the pieces on parchment to allow them to dry some and to cool off a bit. The extruder is one hot puppy and makes these babies warm to the touch like fresh prints from the copier.
My full double recipe netted 25 feet of pasta, enough for 140 postage-sized ravioli pieces. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, the Raviolamp:
He's another survivor of many moves and kitchen culls and is about as old as my Pasquale cookbook. I love this little guy. His cutting lines are sharp and firm and he's so smooth that he doesn't need flouring. I did it once here for old time's sake and then stopped bothering. What a joy this pan is to use. I put him straight to work:
Two pasta sheets "glued" together with a light brushing of egg wash (beaten egg applied lightly with a clean paintbrush - yay edible glue) made the base. Then I gently pressed the dough into each of the pockets in the pan:
Then I did the work of fairies, sweet bluebirds and wee mice - stuffing cups the size of flipping postage stamps:
The trick to this is to keep the filling level with the top of the pan. No overfilling, no mounds, or you've got mess everywhere when you try to seal them or - worse - when they simmer in the saucepan. Level, level, level. They just look really small - you really will be able to taste that pinch of meat, promise!
Then I applied a second egg wash for luck all around the fillings, brushed on like I was cleaning tile grout (this is way more fun). Horizontal and vertical stripes, no globby egg bits, just a smooth sheen.
And then the top hat went on:
I spread two more overlapping pasta sheets along the pan to cover the filling and edges completely, then lightly went over the whole pan with a rolling pin (a real one, not the dollhouse one that comes with the Raviolamp. That I redeployed that as a cocktail muddler years ago). You need the weight of a real rolling pin and its big handles to keep your knuckles from scarring the pasta as you go.
I flipped the pan over on the cutting board, trimmed one short and both long edges flush with the pan, and then lifted the pan up at a 45 degree angle from the cutting board. Pulling gently on the remaining short pasta edge up in the air, I carefully pried the first row from the mold. As each row slowly released I eased them down to the cutting board until I had freed the whole solid sheet.
Voila! Holy choirs sang! The belly gods were well pleased. I cut the ravioli into individual little pieces and then went back through the entire process five more times. Thatza lotta pasta!
Aren't they darling? They're not too cute to eat, though....
Simmered in stock and wine for 10 minutes (and gently removed singly with a slotted spoon) and napped with practically any sauce (here you see my homemade tomato sauce) makes these abso-flippin-lutely celestial. Dinner is served.
And whatta lotta leftovers! These little guys darken or speckle within 24 hours in the fridge, so freeze uncooked extras for another fab dinner (when you won't be tired from making them all day - bonus!). They're quite filling, so count on no more than 5-7 per person for a first course and maybe a dozen or so as a main. Even Vlad can't eat 140 of these babies. What a delight to find these in your freezer.
Wine pairings? Doesn't matter. Side dishes? Doesn't matter. Dessert choice? Doesn't matter. All that matters is that the ravioli was delicioso and that it took our minds off the rain for an entire meal. The three hypnotic hours of ravioli prep also made me ready for a good long winter's nap. With these little birdy arms dreaming about flying's gonna be as close as I get to rising above the rain.
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