Ravioli!

My mum and dad gave me a pasta machine a few years ago as a birthday present after me seeing one and falling in love with the idea of making pasta from scratch. Well, since I received it I have only made past once. A while back I made fettuccine and it was so good.  But a few months ago a good friend of mine and I conceived the idea of making ravioli. After putting it off and not being able to find a day that we had enough time on we finally got our act together and found a time. It was definitely an experience. It all started off pretty umm, well... interestingly. We got out what I thought was semolina flour, it had an odd smell but I just ignored it. As we started trying to mix the dough up it just wouldn't mix properly. So I'm racking my brain trying to figure out what could be wrong but I couldn't figure it out. Just as I'm about to give up I look at my friends face. There was a look of absolute disgust on it. She told me to taste the dough. I did and immediately spit it out. It was disgusting. It finally dawned on me what the odd smell was: yeast. Yes, we had used brewers yeast to make dough. Let me tell you it didn't work. We thew out that 'dough' and started back at the very beginning. We just used pastry flour this time and it worked with no problems. We then whipped up a simple cheese filling that tasted sooo good. 

Once we had finally made our dough and filling we then moved on to the exciting part. Time to actually use the pasta machine! We got it all rolled and made into ravioli. It comes out in these long sheets which break apart into separate raviolis. They looked amazing. It's always so cool to make something and then have it look how it should! 

 Here's the pasta machine! The lower part is for rolling the dough out thinly and the upper is the ravioli attachment. 

 Here's a closeup of how the machine makes the actual ravioli. 

Coming out of the machine. 

 All finished!!!

But then we had to make our second mistake. And this one was even worse. We without thinking piled all the pasta on top of each other onto a plate to wait to be cooked. Well as we went to pick the pasta up and put it in the pot of boiling water we realized our mistake. All the pasta was stuck in one big lump. Oh snap. really? We had to be that dumb? But we had to come up with some solution this was our dinner! We decided to go ahead and cook the pasta in it's lump form anyway and see what happened. It couldn't get worse then it already was right? So we cooked the pasta plopped it into a casserole dish, put the left over ravioli filling on top, then added some red sauce and Mozzarella cheese. Then we cooked it for a bit (until it looked done, no I don't know how long that was.) It actually tasted really good. So congrats to us for using our lil ol' brains and salvaging what could have been a complete failure.

Here's the little bit of pasta we managed to salvage.  

With some nice red sauce. 

And so after about four hours of laughter, tears and sweat we succeeded in making a dinner which even though it wasn't what we wanted or expected tasted quite good.

~Alyssa <3