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

New Years Dinner

For Christmas this year we all (yes all eight of us kids) decided to make dinner for our parents. And well as some of you know we don't like to do things by halves at our house. Nicole (the oldest sibling and the one who really did most of the work) did some planning and found recipes for almost the whole dinner. After finding quite a few she and I looked them over deciding which looked the most gourmet and delicious. So New Years day starting at about three we commenced to make an amazing dinner for our parents and Nonna, who is visiting for a bit. After two hours of madly dashing about the kitchen preparing dish after dish. We were ready. Amazingly with five girls tripping over each other in one kitchen there hadn't been any tears or arguments. Everything worked out and we were ready. We notified our "guests" that their table was ready.

For appetizers we had made Calla Lilly Crepes and Cucumber Roses. 

The original recipe for the Calla Lilies said white bread but as white bread is pretty much against my every belief we were going to try whole wheat pita pockets. Lets just say they failed. So I quickly brainstormed and came up with crepes. They worked wonderfully! Oh and so much fun to make, not to mention how yummy they are. :)

The cucumber Roses were made from thinly sliced cucumbers soaked in very salty water and rolled into a rose shape held together with toothpicks. 

They even looked a bit like lilies! 

For the first course we served Sweet Potato Soup with Cranberry Garnish. I normally hate soup but this was actually extremely good.

The Cranberry garnish added a nice touch.

The second course was my favorite. Qinua Stuffed zucchini. Brilliant. We stuffed halved zucchini with a quinua, cannallini beans, tomatos and almonds with freshly grated Parmesan sprinkled on top. Sooooooo good. :)

For our main course we served Chicken Cacciatore. Definitely not my favorite part of the meal. But it was pretty good too, not as gourmet as the rest of the food but not bad either.

For our last course we served Massaged Kale and Mango Salad. Yes, I did say massaged. And yes, I did mean massaged. We literally massaged the kale with our hands until it was soft, so no cooking just massaging. It was weird. But oh, the end product was amazing. One of the most delicious salads I have ever eaten. 

For desert we served Chocolate Raspberry Cream Pie. It had a graham cracker crust, a chocolate ganache layer and raspberry cream filling all topped with raspberry's and drizzled chocolate. It looked amazing and tasted even better.

~Alyssa <3