Crab and Goat Cheese Ravioli

I saw this recipe in an issue of Cuisine at Home.  I like Cuisine at Home because most of the recipes are pretty easy so I can whip them up during the week after a long day at work.

The "guts" of the ravioli is just goat cheese, crab, chives, salt and pepper.  Pretty simple.  Even more simple, the recipe called for using won ton wrappers for the dough.  I love to make pasta, I make it all the time, why use won ton wrappers when I can make pasta? So I made pasta

I usually use the recipe my grandmother taught me, 6 cups of flour, two eggs, two tablespoons of oil then more oil and/or water until it "feels right".  I still remember being 9 or 10 years old learning to make pasta with Grandma Cicero.  Grandma was little, maybe five feet tall, and had terribly arthritic hands.  They were all curled up.  I remember as she was teaching me to knead and how to know when it was "right" I would complain that my hands hurt.  I'm still amazed at how strong she was!

Grandma Cicero and Mom in Grandma's Kitchen

I still start kneading by hand, and I still finish by feel, but now I have a Kitchenaid to help with the work!  I mentioned I usually used Grandma's recipe, well, not this time.  I recently purchased a new app for my Ipod, Ratio by Michael Ruhlman.  It's a cool little app and if you want to get better at "throwing things together" without a recipe, I highly recommend it. 

So I used this app to determine to make my pasta this time.  There's no oil in Michael Ruhlman's pasta recipe.  Concern.  I've always made it with oil.  There are a lot of eggs in Michael Ruhlmans' pasta.  Concern.  Oh well, time to try something new!  According to the app, for about a 1 3/4 pounds of flour (about 6 cups) I needed 9 eggs.  Yes 9.  I thought that was a lot of eggs but I plowed on.

The dough came together much more quickly than my "normal" dough but it was stickier.  I added more flour until it felt "right" to me.  Let it rest and worked on making the filling and getting everything set up to make the ravioli.

When Grandma and I made ravioli we did it the hard way.  We rolled out the dough with a wooden rolling pin (not the heavy marble one I later bought for rolling pasta, I'm not as tough as my Grandmother!) and we hand cut them and crimped them with a fork.  They were not aesthetically perfect but they tasted perfect and that's what mattered!

Now I have these cool little ravioli presses that allow me to crank out two dozen ravioli in a matter of minutes.  Add the filling, roll the top (or bottom) layer of dough and out pop these "perfect" little pillows.

I have a pasta roller I attach to my Kitchenaid to roll out the dough too.  No more rolling pin!  No wonder I'm not as strong as my Grandma was.  With my dough, I usually roll it to a #5 on my roller, this dough tore when it was that thin so I used a #4 thickness.  That was really the only difference I noticed in the doughs.

In this recipe the ravioli are fried then steamed, not boiled, then topped with a white sauce made by sauteing garlic slices in butter then adding heavy cream.  Heavy cream is like butter, everything is better with it!  This is reduced, you add a little lemon juice then season with salt and pepper and on the ravioli it goes.

The ravioli was good.  Just good.  Dave and I both prefer either Grandma's ricotta cheese filling or butternut squash (which I happened to have in the house so I made some ravioli with it since I had extra dough).

I also made Alex Guarnaschelli's Caesar salad, which was delicious, and some homemade bread.  Oh and a Cuvaison Pinot Noir too.  Can't forget the wine.