Perfect Pasta

Until recently, our only experience making pasta from scratch ended on a bad note and, I am embarrassed to say, we put away our pasta machine for a decade. We were members of a gourmet dinner group and it was our turn to host a meal. The entree was to be raviolis filled with a crab mixture and topped with a delicate creamy tomato sauce. As usual, we practiced by making the meal a few weeks before the dinner date. All went well. The day of the event, I decided to use Martha Stewart’s butter pasta recipe rather than the one we’d tried. Big mistake! It was a warm day and I didn’t allow the pasta to chill long enough and ended up with a mess.

After that experience, the only raviolis we’ve made are from a John Ash recipe, which specifically calls for prepared wonton skins, and is filled with a chunky asparagus mixture. Delicious! Last month when we had an abundance of butternut squash, one of the recipes we tried was squash raviolis made with a homemade pasta. Because we’d had good results with the wonton skins, we decided to use them rather than making fresh pasta. It had been over ten years, but my failure making fresh pasta was still clear in my mind. Well, our raviolis last month were a disappointment. They were edible, but certainly not something we’d make again. This time, I decided we would not be beat by a little failure in the kitchen.

Out came the pasta machine (after we found it buried behind other gadgets in the pantry we rarely use) along with a new recipe for butternut squash raviolis and two additional recipes, one filled with an Italian sausage mixture and another filled with a spinach mixture. A few hours in the kitchen and we’d perfected the process of making the dough and had made over 150 raviolis. That evening we sat down to a progressive meal of the three different kinds of raviolis, each topped with it’s own unique sauce. Today we made more raviolis to take as a gift to our daughter. They are a perfect make-ahead appetizer or meal as they may be cooked from the frozen state by adding just a couple of minutes to the cooking time.

We had another failure last month when we made butternut squash gnocchi. It was our first time making gnocchi. In hindsight, it would have been better if we’d started with traditional potato gnocchi to have a better feel for the desired consistency of the dough. Butternut squash adds much more moisture to the dough than a dried, baked potato, and our dough was much too soft to roll and shape. However, we managed to make and eat sixty (not in one sitting) almond-shaped nuggets embellished with the tine marks of a fork. Like the raviolis, they were also edible, but we knew we could do better.

If you want to make gnocchi, my suggestion is to take a lesson from the expert…Chef Fabio Viviani of the Yahoo show Chow Caio. We watched his show on making gnocchi twice, went into the kitchen excited and confident, and made a 100+ potato gnocchi. No special tools required and we even skipped the tedious markings we made on our earlier attempt.

Just a day in the kitchen and we’d filled the freezer with our tasty efforts. We’re already talking about our next pasta experience and our pasta machine is now in an easy-to-get-to, prominent place in the pantry.

Note: The backside of our pasta machine has two cutters – one for spaghetti and the other for linguine. Rather than discard the trimmings of dough (in our case, we gave them to the chickens) run them through one of these cutters, boil them in salted water for a few minutes until el dente, toss in olive oil and garlic, top with Parmesan cheese and fresh basil, and enjoy! After making raviolis this morning we did just that and enjoyed a tasty lunch of fresh pasta.