Homemade Ravioli

Paul and I were motivated one Friday evening to make our own pasta. Four hours later, we were ready for dinner. It's definitely a lot of work, but a fun experience (especially when your frantic pasta making is fueled by wine and sheer hunger). We started by making Mario Batali's tomato sauce recipe (it's our go-to for making sauce).

We made two fillings -- a roasted squash with sage and a ground turkey with ricotta cheese and Italian seasonings. We used the tomato sauce with the turkey, and make a sage brown butter sauce for the squash ravioli. 

The sauce bubbling away on the stove.

Turkey, ricotta and Italian seasonings on the left -- roasted squash and sage on the right.

Paul is usually the pasta-maker in our house, but I helped roll it out as well this time!

We used a pizza cutter instead of a more traditional pastry wheel or pasta cutter.

Squash ravioli with browned butter and sage sauce

Turkey meat ravioli with a fresh tomato sauce

It's definitely time consuming, but also pretty fun and rewarding to make your own pasta. Food just seems to taste better when you've made it yourself. I think I would have a little less dough on the outer edges of the ravioli next time, as it cooks differently than the pasta that is surrounding the filling (i.e. it takes longer to soften up since it's two layers of pasta versus one). I think I would just trim the ravioli a little more next time to solve that problem. My favorite was the squash ravioli with the brown butter and sage sauce -- so delicious!

We also had TONS of leftovers -- and opted to freeze them, uncooked for a quick dinner another evening. We defrosted and cooked them yesterday for a tasty mid-week meal!

Breaded Mussels

We've recently been really excited to start cooking some more seafood. For a nice, relaxing Sunday dinner, we made breaded mussels to eat alongside some soup and salad. The recipe was quite simple to do -- we spend much more time prepping the breaded mixture and soaking/cleaning the mussels than actual cooking time. 

I've also resolved myself to the fact that I need to buy more mussels that I think, as some always need to be tossed out. They open too early (and won't close back up), they don't open at all, they are cracked -- a few have to go unused no matter how carefully I treat them. Oh well.

Some of the steamed mussels

Cooking up the pancetta

Paul topping the mussels with the breadcrumb mixture

After browning in the oven

I loved the way that these turned out. The breadcrumb topping was salty and crunchy. Adding the strained wine mixture to the mussels before broiling added another level of flavor also -- you definitely noticed that little extra something.  I topped mine with a little squeeze of lemon juice as well. They were gone in a flash.