Moving, Green City and Pasta

Wow, what a week. I often forget how chaotic my life can be right now because I just moved into my new apartment a few weeks ago and things are in boxes all over... at least that is how the week started anyway. To my surprise when I dropped in on my old apartment last Saturday I entered into a place with someone elses stuff into it. Apparently my old landlord had rented the place but had not communicated it to me. Technically my lease was good till the end of April, since I was downsizing I wanted to give myself ample amount of time to get the mountain of paintings and everything else moved and organized at the new place without overwhelming myself.

My goodies from Green City Farmers Market

This was doubly disappointing because earlier in the day on Saturday I had stopped in at Green City Farmers Market and picked up some delicious food I was hoping to pickle this past week. Well, that didn't happen at least not yet anyway. I'm planning on tomorrow to be a day of pickling. So as I attempted to get everything out of the old place, and try to get organized at the new place I had a few bags of food taunting me.

Finally by Thursday evening after a long day at work and solid progress moving every day this week I came home and attempted to make pasta for the first time because my new pasta machine had arrived earlier in the week. Pasta I find is a fundamental thing that I should not be buying at the store. If it's as easy as they say to make, my home made stuff will be so much better than store bought food.

New pasta machine!!

A few things about this process, first, the first time you do it don't start the process at 10pm. Not listening to common sense, I was hungry after all, I jumped right in and tried to figure it out. I will note, I did not read the directions lol. The other thing is I was all out of all purpose flour, the last time I cooked in my old kitchen I used up the last of my APF and apparently not replaced it yet, so I made pasta from bread flour instead. I probably won't do it again unless I'm in a pinch, I was too tired to go to the store.

I have been reading Michael Ruelman's book called "Ratio", it's a fantastic book that doesn't use recipes but ratio's of ingredients. I really like this because you can scale the quantity of food you may need to prepare based on the number of people you are cooking for. Armed with the basic pasta ratio of 2 part egg, 3 parts flour and a digital scale, I set out to make some pasta from the awesome eggs I got from Green City. Meanwhile, I had also started working on a variation of a homemade pasta sauce I haven't made in years. I absolutely love home made pasta sauce, it's freshness is beyond anything one can imagine. I like mine with the chunky goodness of broken down tomatoes, not pureed so when all things are done and a hunk of basil towards the end you get something like this.

 

Back to the pasta. So not really knowing what the heck I'm doing, I whipped out this pasta. Granted, had I read the directions, I would have learned all about that tri-fold technique and decreasing the size of the roller every few passes to get that nice soft thin noodle. Instead what you see here is a few passes on the largest setting and run through the thick noodle attachment. This made for a decent noodle, but it was tough when cooked. Blast.

After reading about how this process worked a little more, and checked out a few video's on the interwebs I figured: Ok, I was close just some minor technicalities. Friday rolled around and by this point in time I'm super tired after my long week. The complexity of this project at work combined with this move has me in zombie mode by the end of Friday. I need good food and lots of it. My friend Kelly and I decided that we'd get together for the first of many team cook offs at the new apartment. While we were at it we kicked things up a notch and went for making Ravioli for the first time. I had stopped by The Chopping Block earlier in the week to get a ravioli stamp because I love love LOVE ravioli.

Armed with the new knowledge about how rolling pasta is really suppose to work, a new bag of all purpose flour and ample wine, what transpired was magic. It took some getting use to, but after the second or third path of pasta we did it got much easier and began to make sense.


With our pasta sheets all rolled out, we made a Asparagus & Ricotta filling and proceeded to make awesome ravioli using a egg wash to seal the little guys up. In the future, I want to figure out how to use all the trimmings a little better, I think the stamp promotes a lot of waste... I do like those crinkly edges however. 

The end result, Asparagus & Ricotta ravioli with a homemade tomato sauce and the first group meal in my new apartment. A perfect end to a very long week.

Asparagus Ricotta Ravioli with Roma Tomato/red wine based sauce comprised of garlic, onion, red pepper sauteed in butter.