I have to admit, I’m not a huge pasta fan. I mean, I like it, but usually only in certain forms. If I’m at a restaurant, I may order something a little fancier – usually only if it has seafood added to it, though. But even then, I generally order it if it has either alfredo or a white wine sauce, and is either fettuccine, spaghetti or angel hair. Rarely is it anything else. And when I make it at home, I go super simple: boxed fettuccine, macaroni or spaghettini. The fettuccine usually gets paired with jarred alfredo sauce, the macaroni baked with cheese, and the spaghettini with butter and grated parmesan or goat’s mozzarella. I’m definitely not a fan of tomato-based sauces.
All of which is why I surprised myself when I decided I wanted to make ravioli from scratch – and paired it with a tomato-based sauce, to boot.
Admittedly, I cheated when it came to the sauce; I bought a jar of sundried tomato and garlic sauce from the grocery store. But you know what? I think I earned it with the homemade ravioli.
The recipe came from the Company’s Coming Pasta cookbook, and can be found on page 115. I couldn’t find a copy of the recipe online, but I did scan it for you. You can check it out at the bottom of this post.
Anyway, the ravioli turned out to be pretty easy to make. The pasta dough is fairly simple; it’s only four ingredients – eggs, olive oil, flour and water – and they come together fairly easily.
The ingredient list for the filling is a bit longer, but it’s still pretty simple to bring together. Everything gets mixed together at once, and the only cooking involved at this stage involves the spinach. The recipe calls for frozen chopped spinach that’s been cooked and squeezed to drain, but I’m sure you can use fresh spinach – still chopped, cooked, and drained – instead of frozen.
Honestly, the hardest part of this recipe was rolling out the dough. I found that it takes quite a bit of arm muscle, which, unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of. The recipe says to make it paper-thin, but I think mine ended up a little bit thicker. This didn’t affect the cooking time at all, though; it just meant I ended up with fewer ravioli.
After the ravioli are cooked, you just remove them from the water, toss them in butter, and serve. The recipe recommends serving them as-is, with garlic butter or with meat sauce. I served mine with a Sundried Tomato and Garlic sauce, which seemed to go really well with them.
This is definitely a recipe I’d consider making again… though I may enlist someone to help me roll out the dough.
Miranda Burski 
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