Rainy Day Ravioli

Weather's drizzly here and Rick's got a busy important new job so I decided to do something I'd been planning for weeks: make a bunch of fresh ravioli and freeze it for dinners. I wasn't exactly the barefoot contessa at this, but I was barefoot, with quite a nice pedicure.


I started with the plan of mushroom ravioli, but ended up doing some butternut squash ravioli too. And then I went crazy and made walnut pate and put that in ravioli too!

I won't go through the pasta recipe--that can be found on my very first post. But for the mushrooms, I threw 16 oz of fresh shrooms in the processor and then sauteed them down to about 2.5 cups (seasoned with fresh garlic also and a dash of balsamic vinegar).

Next time, I think I will roast the mushrooms first, because they ended up being soggy and having to cook down for a while.

For the butternut squash filling, I roasted a split squash at 400 degrees for 40 minutes, then scooped it into the processor and pureed it with more fresh garlic.

My favorite was the walnut pate-- toasted walnuts, olive oil, a spoonful of cooked mushrooms, and fresh garlic. Salt and some parlsey and...vegetarian gourmet!A fantastic appetizer on toasted baguette. Almost too good to put into ravioli. Almost too good to let anyone else share...but I started to get really bad garlic breath after eating these four myself, so it went into the ravs.

First I laid pieces of flat pasta down, spooned the filling on them, and sealed them closed before cutting them with a pizza slicer (into the squares at top, the ones in front of the toes).

But that wasn't as pretty as cookie-cutter-ing circles and then sealing them up.
Let me just note here that in my opinion, dogs in the kitchen mean the food will taste better. I realize the health department doesn't always agree with me on this, but what do they know?

Then, following advice from a recent article I read, I let them chill in the freezer for ~15 minutes before throwing them in a bag. I meant to do 4 bags, but 2 seemed like enough and that gave me leftover pasta dough.

This hermetically sealed bag was closed with the advanced technology I call "Close the bag most of the way and then suck the air out with your mouth."