Indianapolis, IN

Thu 26 July 2007

So, I’m thinking about making your own pasta. My husband always jokes with me that I’m not very domesticated. But every now and then, I get some half-baked idea in my head to disprove him, and this time it was to make my own ravioli. Now it seemed like a good idea right up to the point that I had to actually MAKE the ravioli. Well, first I had to go online to figure out how to do this. (This is one reason that I think the Internet can be such a wonderful place—all the things you can learn!) So, I found a website, and even though I chose to ignore the difficulty rating of a 4/5, I printed it off and went at it. I only chose that recipe, because I had all of the ingredients. And I thought, I have a college degree, how hard can this possibly be?? Well, the making of the dough wasn’t that hard. I handled that pretty well. And then making the stuffing for the ravioli wasn’t that hard. (You just mix a bunch of stuff together in a bowl.) But now it comes time to roll out the dough and cut the ravioli. That’s the part of the directions they left out. (I guess they assumed that people would have some kind of prior knowledge of these things. You know what they say about when you assume: it makes an ASS out of U and ME; well, mostly me in this case.) I tried and sweated and cried and cursed about getting the dough to right consistency, and then when I finally did, it was time to roll it out. Now maybe it would’ve also helped if I had owned a rolling pin, but never fear, I’m the queen of substitutions. (I used a can of cooking spray on its side as a rolling pin.) Once I started in this process, I could see that it was going to be a longer ordeal than I originally thought. So, instead of ravioli, I ended up making something that was like a pirogi, as big as a Hot Pocket. After about 40 minutes of muttering the words, “This is a horrible idea. This is the last time I’ll ever do this. What was I thinking?” about once a minute, I finally made six flat circles of dough. So, after I filled them with my filling, and folded them, I brushed them with olive oil and sprinkled parsley flakes and baked them for 15 minutes or so. Afterwards, I did top them with my own tomato sauce that I made from scratch from a recipe I made up. Actually, they were so good, it was stupid good. I mean, they turned out really good. So, maybe I’ll give it another try, and learn from my trials and tribulations of making dough from scratch. And maybe next time, Emeril won’t cringe at novice pasta making stories.

: make your own pasta, make your own ravioli, Italian food