Pasta Project Parts 2 and 3: It's About More than the Dangly Bits

I'm making turkey lasagna tonight.  We ended up with a little extra homemade sauce and not much room in our freezer for it, so the next logical step is, of course, to turn it into something yummy.  I have a confession, though…  I will be using boxed noodles.

"What?" you say.  "You were off to such a great start with your pasta attachment!  What happened?"

All I can say is that it was a classic case of success leading to cockiness and then my downfall.

The second time I pulled the pasta maker out was to make spaghetti.  I figured I'd give the filled pasta a rest and focus on something relatively simple:  noodles.  I think the dough sensed my heightened confidence, as it first decided to cower in fear in the bowl:

Then it huddled among other objects on the counter as it rested:

The sheets emerged from the rollers beautiful, long and silky.  The recipe said to let them rest for a bit, which helped to dry them out. 

Then came the harder part, sending it through the noodle cutting apparatus.  However, again it went smoothly, and I ended up with gorgeous long spaghetti noodles.

The spaghetti was in anticipation of my birthday, which was at the end of February and a couple of days away, so badass me even made calzones from homemade dough that night:

Yeah, I was rocking the kitchen.  I didn't get a chance to blog it for other reasons, which I will get to, but I was feeling confident.  My spaghetti making had gone without a hitch, and I now had a full set of lovely two ounce nests in my freezer.

Then, mid-march for Hubby's birthday, I decided to try the ravioli again.  I adjusted the recipe a little according to directions from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, adding a tablespoon of milk to the dough and allowing the eggs to come to room temperature so the dough wouldn't be tough.  I also made some of her Ricotta-Parsley filling for inside the ravioli.  The pasta sheets came out lovely and silky, and I made them a little thinner this time, taking the rollers to 5 rather than 3, which had made them too thick the previous time.

I had my pasta and filling.

I had my strategy.

I even had a blog post planned out in my head titled, "It's all about the dangly bits."  I was going to be witty and clever and compare pasta making to writing romance and the importance of a certain kind of chemistry between characters. 

That's where it all went wrong.  No, I don't have any pictures from this process.  It was too gruesome.

In an effort to make the ravioli not come out thick and tough, which they were edging on the first time, I overcompensated.  Once I fed the dough into the ravioli press, the weight of the remaining dough on the sides caused it to stretch, and therefore only the middle row of ravioli (of three) ended up being completely sealed.  The outer two rows were pitiful half-raviolis that oozed filling.  The second sheet went a little better, but by the time I got to the third, it had dried out too much.  Stubbornly, I pressed on, but it mocked me, and I had very few keeper ravioli.  The fourth sheet got turned into fettuccine.  Here's the final result.  As you can see, there are many fewer usable ravioli than with my first attempt:

I still succeeded in my carb production efforts with a lovely focaccia, though:

And dinner turned out fine:

So yes, I could make pasta dough tonight.  Lasagna sheets would be easy, but I'm a bit demoralized.  I'm obsessed with the ravioli, my little square nemeses, and should I proceed with any kind of homemade pasta, the idea of ravioli would be taunting me.  The rollers would whisper, "We're over here!  Ravioli filling and lasagna filling is similar.  Just make a little extra and try again."

Oh, I will attempt them again with fewer recipe tweaks, thickness 4, and perhaps only two sheets so they won't dry out as quickly, but not tonight.  See?  This is why it's a bad idea to mix perfectionism and pasta.

However, red wine and pasta always go well together, so tonight, Hubby and I will be partaking of the Mettler Cabernet Sauvignon.  It's a good wine for those who love fruity and well-balanced reds, and this cool snap is the perfect opportunity to visit those big reds one more time before we shift to whites and more heat-friendly reds.

And yes, I will remember next time that when it comes to writing romance and pasta, it's about more than the dangly bits.

Note as to why I haven't been posting much this year:

Remember how when you were a kid, and there was that one toy you wanted so badly you felt like you needed it?  And then how when you got it, you couldn't play with anything else for hours, you were so enamored of it?  Well, we have the same strength of desire as adults, but we often don't admit what it is we really really want.

I got it at the end of January when I got THE EMAIL (in this modern age, you don't get THE CALL anymore) that a publisher was interested in one of my novels.  I made some minor edits they suggested, signed the contract, and since then have been hard at work on the sequel.  I just sent the sequel proposal to the editor, and I'll be getting my major edits for the first novel soon.  

So that's where my writing energy has been going.  There hasn't been a lot of energy to spare with work being super crazy with major personnel issues, and honestly, writing the sequel has kept me sane.  I will get to the samples and wine fridge I need to review soon and will try to post more often.

The Great Pasta Project: Attempt One

When making pasta, be sure to have plenty of booze on hand.

For those who are wondering, being half Italian does not automatically confer pasta making skills upon you.  My first couple of tries at fresh homemade pasta resulted in thick lumps of chewy dough with sweet potato in the middle that I euphemistically called "ravioli."  The problem wasn't necessarily the recipe, but rather that I couldn't get the dough thin enough by hand, not even with a tapered rolling pin, so the texture was off.

I'm a perfectionist, so this failure to make good pasta by hand really irked me.  I determined that the fault was not mine, but rather my inferior tools, so I hinted at Hubby that I would like a pasta making attachment for my Kitchenaid mixer.  This was my Christmas present:

Yes, he likes pasta, too.

Rather than start with something easy like long noodles, I decided to dive right in with butternut squash ravioli based on this recipe from Cooking Light.  Instead of using wonton wrappers, I made my own pasta dough.

So, first step, make the dough itself.  The Kitchenaid recipe that comes with the ravioli maker is simple enough with just four ingredients:  flour, eggs, water, and salt.  Mix for a bit with one attachment, then for a while longer with the dough hook.  The pasta dough, not being in an agreeable mood, attacked the dough hook like sentient swamp ooze on a tourist:

Um, yeah, I know what that kinda looks like.  A geoduck!

It's resting...and plotting.

I rescued the dough hook and took over the kneading by hand.  The dough took a lot of flour before it became tacky rather than sticky, or so I thought.  I let it rest and made the ravioli filling, then grabbed the pasta rolling attachment.  I fitted it to the Kitchenaid on the first try.  My first roll was a bit short, but okay.  The second one came out perfect:  long, lovely, and silky.  I put it on the cutting board, which I thought had enough flour on it, and covered it with plastic wrap.  Then I did the third and fourth sheets, also pretty, but not quite so much.

I let the sheets rest for the requisite ten minutes, switched out Kitchenaid attachments for the ravioli one, and read the directions twice.  This is where the dough really started messing with me.  The first step is to take a sheet of dough, fold it in half, put the folded end in the ravioli maker, turn it a little to catch the dough, and then allow the two ends to drape gracefully over the sides.  I did that with the pretty second sheet and got as far as folding it in half and anchoring it in the ravioli maker.  Then it wouldn't unfold.  Crap.  Lesson learned:  when they say to dust the dough with flour, they're not kidding.

This is supposed to make it easy.

That sheet ended up being rolled out again.  I attempted the ravioli with an adequately dusted pasta sheet, which anchored and draped as it should have.  I started cranking, and the dough started laughing at me.  Okay, not literally.  The directions say to make sure the ravioli are coming through but don't have any tips as to what to do if they don't.  The attachment should make a ravioli sheet of three across, but only one came out, and I swear it looked at me like a good kid with two naughty siblings:  "See?  I'm doing what I'm supposed to do."  I figured out that the ravioli had stuck to the roller closest to me and gently released them.  They didn't turn out pretty, but they did have stuff in them.

So those were the first ravioli.  I managed to fix that sheet before it got too messed up, and then, overconfident, I proceeded with the second.  This is where I really screwed up, or maybe the dough got smart.  I watched the roller closest to me, but unbeknownst to me, the ravioli got sneaky and decided to stick to the other side.  By that point, I was in pasta-making denial:  "I can't really be screwing this up that badly."  But I was.  Half of that sheet turned into a squashy, doughy mess before I figured out that you have to gently fondle the dough as it comes out of the machine to make sure it's passing through and dangling as it should.  If I can offer a euphemism to my romance writing colleagues, you could refer to…  Never mind.

At least they're tasty.

I salvaged enough dough to roll another sheet and ended up with about sixty little ravioli.  Approximately a quarter of the dough and a fifth of the filling were a loss.  By the time I finished fighting the dough, cooking it, and making the pesto, four hours had passed from my initial optimistic mixing of the dough to dinner.  Hubby, being the wise man that he is, didn't say anything other than it tasted good.

So, here's what I learned:

Use flour liberally on the pasta, on the ravioli maker, and pretty much on anything that doesn't move fast enough in the kitchen.  Okay, maybe not the cat.

Watch the pasta dough at every step.  It's sneaky and defiant.

The ravioli attachment has plastic guides for the ravioli that open for cleaning.  Watch out, they bite.

Choose and pour cooking wine ahead of time.  Yes, I did all this without wine.  Maybe that was my problem.

I think I'll make pappardelle next time.