Adventures in Pasta Making Part 1

At my last appointment with the dietitian, she suggested that if I was getting on alright with turkey mince, that I might want to try making my own ravioli. Normally, stuffed pasta like ravioli is something that I buy pre-packaged from the supermarket, but it almost all contains dairy, which isn’t going down at the moment (*sob*). The only one I found that doesn’t have dairy had pancetta in it, and it made me sick. Sigh.

“Don’t feel you need to go out and buy any new equipment or anything.”, the dietitian says. Do I need an excuse to buy kitchen gadgets?! Instead of spending money, I was good, and put out a call on Facebook to see if anyone had a pasta maker kicking about that I could have a go with. Lo and behold, it turned out that my boyfriend had one in the cupboard that he was given and never used. Rather than any fancy cutters, I just used a glass (one that I use for making perogies) for the job and made crescent moon shaped ones.

That Bailey's glass has cut a lot of perogies in its time!

So yesterday was the first go with it. It was messy, fun, and a lot of work. Not something I would do every day, but now I have a pile of turkey mince ravioli in the freezer.

For the pasta, I went to Beth Hensperger’s site for directions http://www.notyourmotherscookbook.com/all-about-homemade-pasta/

For the filling, I used the filling recipe on this website http://goodpeopleeats.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/turkey-ravioli-with-sage-butter-and.html . I made a few adjustments. Rather than shallots, I used onion granules. I used garlic powder instead of a clove of garlic. As turkey breast mince is so lean, I added some water to the pan to give it some moisture. I possibly over-cooked it a bit though, and it probably would have been better to use turkey thigh as it would have held together better. Rather than the sage and butter sauce on the website, I just made a basic marinara sauce with some passatta to go on top (which I possibly also over-cooked, it was a bit thick for the job). I also had to forgo the Durham Evensong the writer recommended (*pouts*).

Tasty Raviolli

A few things I learnt about pasta making.

#1 You need to run a bit of “dummy dough” through the machine to clean it before you actually start making pasta. The first run came out with a lot of nasty stuff on it. But running that through a few times and pitching it out seemed to do the trick.

#2 This is a two person job.

#3 Doing this when you’re hungry isn’t the best of ideas. It takes too long.

#4 Mix the dough on something with a lip (like a cookie sheet). We had egg EVERYWHERE!

#4 Some mistakes turn out to be good things. “What smells of garlic?” “Not sure.” “Which olive oil did you put in it?” “There’s more than one?” “Yes” *points to bottle used, which is garlic infused*. Oh well, it enhanced the flavour of the pasta!

#5 When realising that your kitchen table doesn’t have enough of a lip to attach the pasta machine, don’t attach it to the counter in front of the drawer with all of your cutlery in it. “Could you pass me a knife, hun?” “Um .. . .”

#6 Use smallish chunks of dough and squish them down to a reasonable thickness before trying to put them in the machine. If you put too much through, you end up with a big mess on the top and it breaks the dough down and you end up with holes in everything. It was easy to make an analogy to how my guts have been behaving.

An analogy for how Crohn's tummies function?

#7 A dough scrapper would have been a good investment (especially for cleaning the table)

It made a rather large batch for two people (or at least for my current appetite), so I froze a bunch. I froze them on a cookie sheet first so they wouldn’t stick together and then put them into individual meal-size bags for storage.

I think I’ll have a few more goes with this and see what else I can create!