Experimental Ravioli at Home

For dinner, I had some butternut squash ravioli, with a side of (surprise!) butternut squash, and a saison beer to drink.

Mid-afternoon, I decided today was a crazy cooking adventure kind of day. And then I remembered seeing this recipe, except I had a butternut squash to get rid of, not a pumpkin. I've made homemade pasta before, but never ravioli, despite having a mysterious, bulky contraption lying around the house for YEARS that appears to be a ravioli mold. So, I went for it.

I made homemade pasta with semolina flour, three eggs, and a little warm water. It's probably my inability to find 00 flour (I was actually sort of offended that the Whole Foods here doesn't sell bulk semolina flour, instead forcing me to buy an overpriced bag of it courtesy of Bob's Red Mill, but that's another story), but my pasta is always pretty dry and finicky. Despite this, I was able to get it stretched through my pasta machine, then press it into the weird ravioli mold, filled, dried out a bit, and into the water. They turned out deliciously, although the recipe's 3-4 minute cooking time is wildly optimistic. Lucky I like my pasta very, very chewy.

Jon was less thrilled. He dislikes squash, and is miserable every fall when I torture him with the seasonal bounty of new, undiscovered squash varieties. He was especially not thrilled when I decided to serve the remaining squash filling as a side dish. Said filling consisted of roasted, mashed squash, mixed with a little ricotta, brown butter, shallots, nutmeg, and bere bere powder (because one of my cardinal cooking rules is that anything is improved by adding more bere bere); I rationalized that nothing in it made it inappropriate as a side. No slimy raw eggs, for example.

The beer was ok, but not amazing. I am still mourning the loss of New Belgium's Saison (bastards), so I was excited to see that Schlafly, the local large-ish brewery, has released a seasonal saison. It's nicely balanced and appropriately fall-ish, but a little syrupy. More bitter, less molasses please.