Tegan, Doro and I — and by law of shared bed also Andy — swore a blood oath to live veggie for a month over a mouthful of delicious burger meat at Schiller Burger in Neukölln.
And as our kitchen will be demolished as of this afternoon only to be rebuilt next weekend we took the opportunity this Saturday to cook some home made pasta. Every pasta begins with a three step dough making process. First you have the crumbly-oh-my-god-it-is-everywhere stage.
Then comes the this-tough-mofo-will-not-get-me stage with lots of sweat inducing kneading.
And finally the look-how-pretty-dough-can-be stage.
While the pasta dough chilled in the fridge to release all the lovely gluten, the filling wanted to be prepared. Lots of basil, some olives, ricotta, nutmeg, parmesan, salt and pepper were chopped, combined and mixed. Around a kilogram of it was eaten straight out of the bowl as it was so good.
The dough was freed from the fridge only to be forced through the pasta machine a billion times until it was thin and lovely. The first batch saw the addition of some basil leaves in the last step.
It took me only 8 weeks between ordering the pasta cutter, because I obviously needed one, and actually using it.
Pretty pasta is pretty.
The pasta was then boiled for a few minutes and served with a lovely rustic buttery tomato sauce, parmesan cheese and a white wine from Saxony. Lovely.
We were more than pleased with the result. Although it took a while to get there (about three hours start to finish) it was absolutely worth it. I made pasta before, but never got past a „This is good, but not better than the bought stuff“. This time I really appreciated the outcome, the possibility to fill the pasta just the way I want together with the fresh dough yield an excellent result. I will not hesitate to serve these ravioli to any guests in the future.
Yum.