Italian Alabama: Take Two

I returned from Cuba just two days before Christmas. That's quite a stark contrast - going from the total lack of commercial culture in Havana to that final marketing push of our most commercialized holiday. But I wasn't complaining - especially come Christmas morning when Santa, in the guise of my sister-in-law Shashi, gave me a shiny new pasta roller. She took a hint from an earlier blog post about my frustrations rolling pasta a few months back and took it upon herself to remedy the situation. Rashmi and I are both thankful for the addition in the kitchen. I put the roller to good use last week with a butternut squash ravioli concontion with pecan butter sauce. I'm still learning the skills to make whole-wheat ravioli with our Elmore county wheat, and I have to get better at timing out the filling. This time my pasta sheets began to dry out before I could get to all of them. But I made a good dozen or so fat ravioli that were the bee's knees. The meal was Rashmi's idea - to make some pasta dish including our butternut squash - so we hunted around the internets and our cookbooks to find some inspiration. Turns out that the new Frank Stitt cookbook, "Bottega Favorita," held a recipe for pumpkin ravioli that we cribbed from. I stole the sauce idea from a hazelnut butter recipe on Epicurious, and the pasta recipe was from Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" - our go-to bible in the kitchen.

If you've never made fresh pasta, it's really quite an interesting and easy process. The best way is to create a flour bowl on a clean countertop and break your eggs directly into the bowl. Beat the eggs, one by one incorporating a little more of the flour each time. Once you've finished beating all the eggs with the flour you should have a sticky (but not too sticky) dough. Work this dough onto a floured surface and knead until it's smooth - just a minute or two. Most recipes suggest you divide the dough here to make rolling easier later and then let the dough rest in the fridge for a little while.

The butternut squash filling was really very simple, and I took some advice from Stitt - especially in roasting the squash first with plenty of olive oil, salt and pepper. I then combined the roasted squash with some onions (our last storage onion, by the way) sauteed in butter with sage from our herb garden. At this point we could have used some goat cheese in the mix, but our foresight didn't include defrosting the cheese before dinner time. I threw in about half a cup of the new Wright's Dairy aged cheddar, and it gave a nice bite to the filling. Not the subtlty of the goat cheese, but needed fat nonetheless.

Next was the inaugural trip with the pasta roller. Sorry no pictures exist of the rolling. It's a two person job, and the cats take terrible photographs. The roller was smooth and easy and I'm a big fan. Don't know how I lived without one. Filling the pasta was simple, but sealing the ravioli became frustrating. The dough began to dry out too fast and I eventually had to abandon the ravioli and cut the remaining pasta into strips. No big loss - the cooked noodles went well with the remaining butternut squash filling for lunches the next day. But the ravioli...Oh the ravioli! Heavenly. Cooked briefly in gently boiling water and then served with a butter pecan sauce (a stick of butter combined with 1/3 cup of chopped roasted pecans, fresh sage, salt and pepper), this meal can't be beat. A new winter classic for the recipe books!