Slow Food Sunday: Ravioli Anyone?

Experienced cooks can go ahead and laugh at me. I was bored. I have no life. And since I'd much rather do anything than watch TV, I cooked today.

All freakin' day!!

From about 3:00 to (no joke) about 11:00 pm.

It all started before noon when I was combing the web for inspiration of what to make for Slow Food Sunday dinner.

I thought about this...



And I thought about making this...



Our Facebook friends encouraged me to try the ravioli route. And things just got a little out of hand. Not only did I make Sweet Potato ravioli...



...but I made a batch of pesto ravioli...



...and Mushroom ravioli...



and lobster ravioli.

I must have lost my mind, right?

RIGHT! (I'm so traumatized that it took me a week to write about it).

I kid, I kid. It was a good experience. The naive know not what they do. Now I know this is the type of project you do on a day that you're snowed in by a big storm in February. NOT on a pretty day in Autumn when you can still enjoy the outdoors.

Here's the painful step-by-step truth:

Throw two 1 lb. critters in a boiling pot of water and cook them for about one minute. Remove them and break off the tail and claws to obtain the meat. Place the bodies in a big resealable bag. Reserve the meat in a separate bowl.



Gently whack the bag of lobster bones with a mallet to break them up into smaller bits. Put two tablespoons of butter in the bottom of a large pot on medium-high heat. Once melted, add 1 cup of chopped onion and a cup of chopped celery and saute until translucent.



Throw the mashed up lobster bones into the pot and cover with about 8 cups of water (until the lobsters are covered). Simmer for about 45 minutes.



Yes, I was totally skeeved...

While that's simmering, place two sticks of butter in a sauce pan on low heat.



I never promised you I was a nutritionist. I leave that responsibility to Alison and Lisa.

When it melts, add the lobster tail and claw meat to the pan and saute for a minute or so. You want it to still be tender, but thoroughly cooked. Reserve some of the melted butter for later.



Then chop up the meat into more bite-sized pieces.

Back over to the pot of bones: You want to strain the liquid of that pot into another clean pot, saving the stock and discarding the rest.



Then put the new pot back on the heat to boil. Continue at a rolling boil until it has reduced down to about a quart of liquid. (Remove half of the liquid and reserve it for any lobster broth-based sauces you choose to pair with this dish later on). Then add a 1/4 cup of some white wine and reduce again, this time as much as possible. (There may be only a tablespoon of liquid once it's reduced completely). I didn't happen to have white wine in the house. Once the temperature outside drops below 70 degrees I tend to switch over to red to stay warm through the winter. What I did have was this:



And of course, once you open a bottle of the good stuff, you really need to drink it while it's bubbly! Hey, it kept me focused while I started working on the ravioli.



The ravioli recipe I was following at A Cozy Kitchen said, "First, you add exactly one cup of hot water to exactly 2 ½ cups of flour. Resist the urge to add eggs; I know it’s probably difficult."

Then mix it up into a dough, split into two dough balls and roll out one of them, getting it as thin as you can without messing it up. It will expand once it gets cooked, so you don't want it to start off thick. It'll only get thicker!

I used a glass to cut out the ravioli shapes. Just place a glass upside down and gently apply pressure and twist until the dough separates into a circular shape you can use as the ravioli pockets.

Add the chopped lobster tail and claw meat into your food processor, with a little bit of the melted butter that you cooked it in, and puree until it's a nice paste. Add a touch of the wine reduction from the pot, salt and some pepper and puree it again to mix all the ingredients.



Fold in a few tablespoons of nice ricotta cheese to the mixture with a spoon until blended. Voila! Lobster Ravioli filling. Now take your cut out ravioli rounds, place a small teaspoon of the filling in the center, spread some egg white around the edges, and place another round on top. The egg white helps to seal the pillow together, and then you press a fork around the edges to create a "stitched" pillow.






By the time I got around to finishing this step, it was literally 10:45 at night. I had been on my feet all day, so it was pointless to try and cook them. I tucked my little creations away on sheets of wax paper on my freezer's ice tray shelf.



All of that work produced just 3 dozen raviolis. One dozen of the Pesto Ravioli. One dozen of the Sweet Potato ravioli. And One dozen of the Lobster ravioli. It wasn't that I ran out of filling either. It was that I ran out of energy to make the ravioli dough! That was the most time consuming part. Lesson totally learned.

During the week I stopped by A & S Foods to see if they had pre-made pasta dough I could buy. Like any good Italian food market, they did. (Whew!)