Pasta adventure

I love pasta. I love most forms of carbs, but I almost never get sick of pasta. Even after being a student for five years and eating it at least twice a week. It’s a comfort food, a hangover cure, and so versatile it can be anything.

Right. Got that out of my system.

Despite this, I have never made my own, so today’s the day. My lovely sister and her husband gave me a pasta machine for Christmas, so I’ve been rather lax at trying it out.

I decided to follow Jamie Oliver’s recipe for the actual pasta, and make my own filling and sauce. I don’t use cookbooks often, but I do have a copy of The Naked Chef. He looks about twelve on the front, so God knows how long I’ve had it, and it might be the first time I’ve followed a recipe from it.

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pasta-recipes/a-basic-recipe-for-fresh-egg-pasta

(one tip I would say for this, he suggests using either a bowl or a clean board. I used a board and nearly made a right mess. Use a bowl.)

While the pasta dough was resting in the fridge, I started on the filling (spinach and ricotta) and the “sauce” which is a sort of pesto.

I put some spinach on to steam: it takes very little water and no time at all. As soon as it was done I left it in a sieve to drain and cool while I got to work on the pesto.

I then toasted some pine nuts. It always bothers me how expensive pine nuts are, but nevermind. I burnt the first batch, and had to redo them because I wasn’t paying enough attention, so made it even more expensive for myself.

Then I shoved a couple of cloves of garlic, a load of olive oil, and the juice of half a lemon in a food processor with as much basil and parsley as I could fit. 

Pulse it/blitz it until it looks like this:

Normal pesto would have the pine nuts in and some parmesan I think, but I just sort of fancied doing it like this.

Then I made a salad and a dressing. Any salad stuff you’ve got to use up.

The dressing was just olive oil, salt and pepper and some lemon juice, shaken up in an old jam jar. (or mustard jar in this case.) Don’t dress the salad till just before serving.

Chop up the cooked spinach, add a pot (or two) of ricotta, some grated nutmeg, some black pepper and some salt (if you didn’t salt the spinach when cooking it). 

Then I rolled. And rolled, and rolled and rolled. It’s quite labour intensive making pasta isn’t it? 

Then I spooned out the ricotta mixture, used water to seal round the edges and carefully pressed down the edges, trying to get all the air out of the middle. I ended up with loads of ricotta mixture leftover, I’d appreciate suggestions for what to do with it!

 Then boil some salted water in a massive pan. Add the ravioli and cook for a few minutes, then drain carefully and assemble! 

Grate some parmesan over the top, or if you’re too cheap to buy parmesan, grana padano. (it’s a bit cheaper, but not quite so good).

I think it worked out pretty good, but perhaps just a touch too thick. Lesson to learn: roll the pasta to the thickness you THINK you need, then roll it at least one notch thinner.

Whilst making this I listened to: 6Music. Liked the montage of clips of Rebekah Brooks and David Cameron and the Jam’s “News of the World.”