rants & recipes

Today we made ravioli. Evin says, every once in a while, "we should  make ravioli sometime" so I put "ravioli" in my list of ideas for vegan mofo. Incidentally, I hardly ever say "we should make ravioli" because it's, well, to be honest, a pain in the ass. I could get into making homemade pasta, I think, if I had more space in the kitchen, space for pasta to dry and we could find a stainless steel pasta machine instead of this chrome steel one that we have to constantly worry about rusting. But that's just homemade pasta, which is quite a bit easier than first, making homemade pasta and then making ravioli filling, stuffing raviolis AND having them not breaking apart while boiling.

But, anyway, we managed to make a meal's worth of ravioli - so here are the details.

Filling consisted of:

• 1/2 onion, diced
• about 10 button mushrooms, diced
• olive oil
• about 1 tbsp Earth Balance and 2 tbsp flour
• about 1 tbsp dried parsley
• black pepper and salt to taste
• 1 recipe Sausage crumbles (minus a little for snacking, I mean, testing for doneness)

Saute onion and mushrooms in oil. Add Earth Balance and flour, cook for maybe 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Add parsley, salt, pepper and sausage.

Filling:

Sausage crumbles were a slight modification of this recipe. I'll post their ingredients in another post soon. I've posted the newer sausage recipe here. They had good 'sausage' flavor, without so much 'Italian sausage' flavor.

Pumpkin Pasta Sauce:

• 1/2 onion, diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 1 1/2 cups water
• about 2 tsp Better Than Bouillon, chicken
• 1/2 tsp powdered sage
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1/8 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 2 tbsp Better Than Cream Cheese
• 1 tsp lecithin (optional - my oil, pumpkin and water didn't want to combine very well)

Saute onion and garlic in oil until translucent.

Add remaining ingredients (except for "cream cheese") and heat well.

Stir in "cream cheese" before serving.

So here are some raviolis being made:

Raviolis have been covered and being pressed:

And here they are - the picture below was taken about 5 seconds before -

we realized we'd made them "upside down" and they were now stuck in the plastic piece! Apparently, in the correct method, a rolling pin is involved - or something.

So here are the pitiful ones, after much struggling to free them.

And here are a few "dough balls" after our patience was wearing thin on dislodging them:

We revised our method of subsequent trays. And after quite a bit of work, finally set down to dinner!

And you know what? The little dough balls were the best ones - didn't have to take a bite of "edge" before getting to the middle. And I've gotten enough vitamin A for, like, a month.