I learned to make ravioli and sage butter from Chef Steve Watts, after my first attempt ended up a squishy disaster and put me off making them for several years. They were effortless to make this time though, I think storing them individually and coating them with semolina was the best tip, and a firmer dough really helps.
I wouldn't necessarily make these for a workday but they are a lovely weekend treat. They don't take too long to make and taste wonderful, but they are not particularly healthy!
I'm assuming that you've already made your pasta and that it's resting in the fridge. Ravioli is best made with slightly dryer, tougher pasta than my usual recipe. I used 2 eggs to 300g pasta and added a little water to bring it together. Kneaded it as much as I could until it had a texture not unlike cold blue-tack. This made a hearty dinner for 2 people, with enough left over to make tagliatelle to dry for later in the week.
Take a bag of spinach and cook through, using a mere suggestion of water to start them off; you want the leaves as dry as possible when they go into the filling. Once cooked, lay them out on a clean teatowel and pat dry.
Use a pair of scissors to cut the spinach into a bowl along with a pot of ricotta, lots of grated nutmeg, pepper and a small pinch of salt. Mix them up and that's the filling done. Try not to eat it all before it goes into the pasta.
Roll out your pasta sheets and pile a small teaspoon of the filling at regular intervals along each strip's length, placing them off-center, nearer the bottom edge. Dab your finger into a saucer of water and dampen the edges and in between the dots of filling, then fold the top half over the bottom half and firm down with the sides of your hands. Press down pretty firmly to make sure they are sealed, then cut into squares with a sharp knife. Sprinkle semolina over a clean tray, lay each ravioli out separately and sprinkle with more semolina.
When you're finished, boil up a huge pan of water and put a sizeable amount of salt in, then add the ravioli. They don't take long to do so keep an eye on them - when they're all floating at the top that's a good sign, a bit like gnocci.
Put a nice, sizeable hunk of butter in a small pan and heat it up until it's bubbling away nicely, then add in a load of fresh sage leaves and cook until the butter is a lovely dark golden colour and the leaves are crispy.
Drain the ravioli out and lay on your plates. Use a spoon to drizzle the sage butter over the top, serve and then promise yourself you'll go to the gym in the morning.
I make my own pasta fairly regularly these days, the general method I use can be found here.
A quick refresher though: 100g flour and 1 egg per portion, mixed together with a pinch of salt, kneaded for 10 minutes and rested in the fridge for about half an hour. Roll it out really flat and cut into the shape you want, using a pasta machine if you have one. I started using semolina flour to coat the pasta to stop it sticking together and it works much better than ordinary flour does.
So, assuming you've made (or bought) your spaghetti you can turn your attention to the sauce, which is really simple but very tasty. If you don't fancy this sauce, you can find other recipes by doing a search for "pasta sauce" (which shows a list of links) or clicking here to display posts in chronological order.
First of all fry up a sliced purple onion and some garlic, then add in some thick cut bacon or lardons. When the bacon is pretty much cooked add in the mushrooms and cook through. Right at the end, stir in a little cream, the juice of half a lemon, lots grated parmesan and finely chopped parsley. Season with lots of pepper and a pinch of salt. Easy peasy!
I got stuck in rotten traffic on the way home from work the other night, bored and hungry, for almost an hour and a half (I only live 4 miles from my office!). My lovely hubby asked me if there was anything he could do to get dinner underway and I jokingly replied "make the pasta!". I was pleasantly surprised when he said "ok... how?" and so promptly referred him to my Pastalicious blog post.
What a hero! By the time I got in the door, the pasta dough was resting in the fridge and he was busy clearing up the work surface. He'd never made pasta dough before and it was delicious, which goes to show that it is worth giving it a go! He made 300g flour / 3 eggs which, with other ingredients, will easily feed four.
I rolled the dough out and turned half of it into spaghetti for dinner, and half into tagliatelle to store for later in the week. The tagliatelli just had to be hung out to dry for a few hours and then stored flat on a tray with semolina.
The sauce was an easy one. Firstly, we boiled the broad beans, shelled them and set them to one side. Then we pan fried a couple of thinly sliced purple onions, three smashed cloves of garlic and one deseeded red chilli until they went soft. Then I melted a big knob of butter into the mix and added a couple of sliced courgettes and cooked them until almost done.
Finally, a glug of single cream, a handful of freshly grated parmesan, the broad beans, a squeeze of lemon juice, salt, pepper and chopped parsley. The spaghetti cooked through in about 3 minutes and I just lifted the pasta straight out of the water and into the sauce, ready to be served. Yum, yum, yum!
I had half a pack (200g) lamb mince left over from the redcurrant burgers and decided to use it to make little meatballs in tomato sauce for dinner.
First thing, I wandered into the garden and picked some oregano and marjoram, to supplement the parsley and basil I already had in the fridge. Then I diced a couple of small onions, several cloves of garlic, a celery stalk and half a long chilli, along with the stalks from the parsley and basil.
I fried up that lot until cooked and then separated half out to cool on the side for a minute. To the remaining oniony mix, still in the pan, I added a tin of chopped tomatoes and a squeeze of tomato puree. Left that to simmer and got on with the meatballs.
The lamb mince went into a mixing bowl with plenty of salt and pepper, a handful of the herbs (chopped finely) and the rest of the onion mixture. Squished it all up by hand and then divided into eight little balls. These went onto a foil covered baking tray, coated in a little olive oil. Into the oven at 180 degrees for about 25 minutes.
I cooked some green beans and set them out on the side with the remaining herbs and a lemon. By this time, the tomato sauce was bubbling away, so I added a shot of vodka and a peice of parmesan heel, along with half a chopped red pepper. Down to a very low heat and left to simmer.
The pasta went on about 15 minutes before the meatballs would be ready, I like spirali so I used them, anything would do though. I reused the bean water to cook the pasta.
When the meatballs came out of the oven I transferred them into the tomato sauce, along with the green beans, the herbs (torn, rather than cut, this time), a sqeeze of lemon juice, a few spoonfuls of pasta water, salt, pepper and a little sugar. Finally I served up with the pasta on the bottom and the meatballs and tomato sauce on the top. A grating of parmesan and it's done. Yum.
Having been a little kitchen crazy recently, I fancied a little break tonight. I made a classic throw-together dinner - few of the ingredients are essential, it can be made with a lot of vegetables that might be in the fridge or freezer and pretty much anything else you have lying around.
I still had the farfalle that I made a while ago, using leftover pasta from the cannelloni, along with some aubergine, leftover from the kibbi. There was also a red pepper, some mushrooms, fresh parsley and oregano, a heel of parmesan, plus I've always got onions and garlic.
I also had a little bit of cream and lemons left from making the lemon tart. With a small pack of thick-cut bacon and some peas from the freezer, this all added up to the makings of a lovely, easy supper.
After chopping the veg, I put the pasta into a pan of boiling, salted water. Then fried the bacon up with the garlic and onions. When pretty much cooked I added in the aubergine, a sprinkling of dried chilli and a few spoonfuls of the pasta water to stop everything sticking. After a few minutes more, the pepper and mushrooms. When everything was cooked, I added the lemon juice and stirred it through before adding the cream, herbs, grated parmesan, salt and pepper.
I drained and sitrred the pasta into the sauce, along with another couple of spoons of the water.
This kind of meal can be made with stock or tomatoes if you don't have any cream and any of the vegetables could be substituted for something else; the base is just pasta, garlic and onion.
The real point of it is that you can make a filling, interesting pasta sauce out of whatever you have in the kitchen; it'll taste better and be better for you than any pre-made jar and takes zero time to do. I think I spent longer writing the four paragraphs in this post than I did cooking it...
The components of Random Pasta Sauce:
1. Liquid: cream, stock, water, tinned tomatoes, passata etc.
2. Alliums: garlic and onions of any kind, even leeks and spring onions can work.
3. Umami: cheese, cured meat, fish, shellfish, tomatoes and mushrooms all give a robust savoury flavour.
4. Vitamins: I usually aim to include at least three different types of veg, to ensure variety in the look, taste and texture.
5. Acidity: lemon juice, vinegar, wine, vodka etc.
6. Seasoning: salt, pepper, fresh or dried herbs, chillies etc.
We had some friends coming over and I wanted to cook something tasty for them. I hadn't ordered enough lamb to make that go around, so I ransacked the fridge and found a couple of courgettes and a pot of ricotta - that'll do! I already had flour, eggs, a tin of tomatoes and so on, which made cannelloni an obvious choice.
First, the pasta. Quick and easy, using the method that Chef Steve Watts showed me. Stick 500g of "00" flour into the food processor, add 3 eggs and two yolks and whizz until it looks breadcrumby. It's perfect, squidge it into patties in your hands, flatten them a bit and wrap in clingfilm to rest in the fridge.
Then, tomato sauce, which couldn't be simpler. Fry up some smashed garlic, a small amount of chilli, some celery and some onions until softening. Add a tin of tomatoes, some tomato puree and a liberal scattering of oregano. Bring up to a simmer, add a squeeze of lemon and a shot of vodka and let bubble away for a while. Then season with salt, pepper and a little sugar. Done.
For the filling, I had two courgettes in the fridge and one in the garden, so to bulk the dish out I also used a few handfuls of frozen peas; having tasted the result I'm always going to include peas now. Grated the courgettes (well, got the other half to do it), then fried up the garlic and chilli with the celery and onion until softened, then added the peas to cook through.
Once cooked I put them in the food processor, because otherwise the texture of the canelloni would be a bit weird. Then back on the stove and the grated courgettes added, cooked gently for a while to evaporate most of the moisture. I added salt and lots of pepper, then left it to cool.
When cool, I added the ricotta and put in the fridge while I rolled out the pasta sheets.
I'm not going to lie - this dough is harder to work with than my previous wetter style dough, but the results are great and it is worth the effort. I've found that giving each peice of dough a good flattening with a rolling pin first is helpful, as is splitting the dough up into small manageable peices. Then pass it through the pasta machine on the widest setting. If bits fall off, or it goes a funny shape, press them back together and pass it through again. This isn't masses of fun but it does come together eventually!
Then you can pass it through the smaller settings until you have a long strip of pasta. Lay this on a teatowel, cover and do it again until you've run out of pasta.
For the cannelloni, I lay out each strip and put a line of filling end to end. I brushed water along the lowermost edge and rolled the pasta over to make a tube. Repeat until out of filling. I used the left over pasta to make farfalle for later in the week; it stores nicely laid out with a coating of semolina flour.
Coat the cannelloni with tomato sauce, dot the ricotta over the top and sprinkle with grated parmesan. Bake for about half an hour at 180 degrees, and enjoy - it really is a lovely meal.
