Bon Appetite!

Saturdays can get pretty boring for me because Danny is at work all day. So today I decided to make some homemade raviolis because I've always wanted to try making homemade pasta and I knew it would kill some time during the afternoon. I was pretty skeptical at first because I'm extremely unlucky in the kitchen, but these raviolis were delicious! I was so proud of myself :) Here is how to make them...

3 c flour
5 egg yolks
salt to taste
water

First put all of the flour on a flat surface (I just used my table). Make a little well in the middle and put all of the egg yolks in the well. Start mixing with your hand. It will be VERY dry with awkward egg clumps at first but just keep mixing. Add TINY bits of water as you go. I just had a pan of luke warm water next to me and would cup a little bit and put it in the dough. Keep adding little bits of water and kneading! When it finally starts looking like dough time yourself and knead for about 10 minutes or until you think it looks good. Roll it into a little ball and cover with a clean towel. Let it sit for 20 minutes.

While the dough is sitting, make your filling for the ravioli. You can experiment with this part. I just mixed some ricotta cheese with grated parmesan cheese. Make sure you don't use that nasty parmesan powder crap... it won't work. You can use a bag of shredded parmesan, or even better, grate a block yourself. If you have never cooked with ricotta cheese then taste it real quick. It's pretty bland and not very good... you can see that you'll want more parmesan than ricotta in the mixture. You can add mushrooms, spinach, meat, etc! Also add salt to taste.

After the dough is done sitting, cut off a piece that's a little bit bigger than a golf ball. Roll it out using a rolling pin. Keep rolling until it's paper thin. Don't get lazy and use super thick dough :) Keep cutting off chunks of dough and rolling them out until it's all rolled out. Use a cup or cookie cutter and cut out your pieces. Put about a teaspoon of the cheesy filling on one piece and go around the edges with some mixed up egg (this will help the pieces stick together). Put the other piece of dough on top and smash the edges with a fork. Do this to all of your ravioli. When you are done, you can either freeze the ravioli, or cook it right away! This recipe will make about 36 ravioli and will take a couple of hours. Get your husband or children to help you and it will go by faster. Even though it's more work and takes longer than boiling store bought ravioli, I promise it's worth it! It's fun to see that you can actually create things and it tastes better. No nasty freezer taste!


I used about 1 1/4 c ricotta and a small bag of parmesan cheese. You can see how much of the filling I actually used!





Here are some more options you can do with the ravioli:

* make steak to go with it
* saute mushrooms to put on top
* make a Parmesan crusted pork to go with it
* make shrimp to go with it
* use simple spaghetti sauce and get some meatballs for it