Pumpkin & Goat Cheese Ravioli
I have been living off salad greens and vegetable soup all week. I am ready for some comfort food. When Betty & I were in Florence many years ago, we learned how to make pasta from a lovely woman in her 500 year old home. Thinking what is available in the kitchen tonight, I found some canned pumpkin and some left over goat cheese from earlier in the week and it just came to me to make some ravioli. I would normally use ricotta cheese, but I improvised and used what is available.
For basic pasta:
¾ cup flour (I add 1 tbl spoon of high gluten semolina to give it a stretchy quality, like I do with pizza dough)
1 egg
Pinch of salt
Tsp of olive oil
Drop the flour on the table and make a hole in the middle into which the egg, oil and salt is dropped into. Mix with a fork and knead it into a ball. Knead with the ball of your hand and fold over and over until it incorporates and stays together in a ball. This takes some effort. After it’s kneaded into a nice ball, wrap it up in some plastic and let it rest while you make the filling. Eventually you can press it and flatten it enough to get it into the coarse setting on the pasta maker.
The filling available at the time included:
½ cup of canned pumpkin
½ cup goat cheese
¼ cup grated parmesan cheese
Pinch of each: salt; pepper; dried rosemary; dried basil; oregano. Mix with a fork.
Run the pasta through the machine and let the rollers continue to knead it. Eventually, after rolling and folding it over several times, it will begin to make a nice flat sheet. It reminds me of when I visited a steel rolling mill in Utah. I saw the red hot ingots of steel poured onto the rolling mill. The block of steel is rolled bach and forth and gets longer and longer as it gets thinner. It does not get wider; it just gets longer each time it is rolled thinner. It’s the same with pasta. So get it to the width you want and roll it consecutively on smaller settings until it is about 2 feet long. Because one foot is about the length of the ravioli mold. However, once the sheet is made, it can be cut into linguini, spaghetti, or other shapes if you prefer.
I used the ravioli mold and put a sheet of pasta onto the mold. Pressed the shaper and filled the depression with a teaspoon of the pumpkin goat cheese filling. A top sheet goes over and a rolling pin is used to press and seal the 2 sheets, leaving the raviolis. There was just enough dough to make one more sheet in which I dolloped some filling and folded the sheet over and sealed it. Then I cut between the fillings to separate the raviolis. They are not as pretty, but taste the same with the sauce over it.
There was about ½ cup of the filling left over, so I mixed it with the jar of Alfredo sauce. The pumpkin gave the modified sauce a nice orange color. The goat cheese and spices in the filling added a good tang to the Alfredo sauce. It’s an easy way to make a store bought jar of sauce into something unique and special.
I wanted a bottle of Sangiovese with the dish, but the only Sangiovese I had was a 5 year extra-long barrel aged Le Cuvier that is best when decanted for 4-6 hours. I'll save that for later. So I opened a bottle of 2008 Paoletti Nero D’ Avola. Nero means black in Sicilian and it is the most important red wine grape in Sicily. Paoletti brought the cuttings from Sicily about 20 years ago and are an exclusive to the Paoletti Winery in Calistoga, Napa Valley. The wine is deliciously fruity with sweet tannins and flavors of a juicy plum, blackberry and ripe cherries. I highly recommend Paoletti wines. And the Cabernet Sauvignons are fantastic with a steak. * Sorry I can't figure how to insert the pictures so they are the right side up.
