22nd
Green Giant
Hasbro must have had future foodies in mind when they churned out the McDonald’s Fries Play-Doh maker because my current obsession with my pasta maker feels like the same school yard bit: put formless dough in, get tubular food item out! Now that I’ve conquered fettuccine, I decided to move onto ravioli and this recipe in Epicurious.com, ravioli di ricotta e asparagi con salsa di piselli, in spite of its excessive vowels won me over with its green on green flavors.
Ahh, the road to ravioli is paved with good intentions. It is inadvisable to let your raviolis rest on smooth metallic surfaces! They will stick and be as gnarly to remove as picketing Congress hotel workers.
After making the usual pasta dough, I blanched 1 lb of asparagus until almost tender and mixed it with 3/4 cup of ricotta and 2 tsp of fresh mint. Yes. MINT. Adventure, embrace it.
I am cheating quite a bit here since most of my raviolis stuck mercilessly to the baking sheet before they even had a fighting chance to boil. I salvaged two lucky ones and snapped the photo before everything fell apart. The green sauce is the “salsa di piselli” part of the recipe—1 cup of snap peas and 2 stalks of green onions blanched in 1 cup of salt water and pureed. The texture definitely needs adjusting, still a little too watery for my taste.
THE NEXT DAY
I had all the same ingredients left over, so I figured, why not another pasta dish?
For lunch today, I made fresh fettuccine and approached the pea puree with a little more flair—in the form of heavy whipping cream. The asparagus were simply blanched and added a great crunch to my lunch. I’ve been accused of being a “pepper monkey” but in this case, the extra spice is just what was needed.
