Ravioli slicer/sealer

With a scratchy throat and the sniffles, I was thinking about easy dinners for this evening. I baked up some pumpkins mid-afternoon, and asked the kids what they thought I should do with them for dinner.

“Pumpkin ravioli!” was the enthusiastic response. I had to admit, it sounded like a great idea, in spite of my lingering cold.

“If you’ll help, I’ll make ravioli.”

And so my daughter and I made ravioli together. Pumpkin ravioli has traditionally been one of those once-a-year meals that I swear I’ll never make again every time. The ravioli takes forever to make, then explodes when it is boiled. I’ve used a ravioli maker with little wells in it, I’ve cut my ravioli with a biscuit cutter and sealed it with my fingers, I’ve cut it with a knife and sealed it with a fork. Doesn’t matter, it takes forever to make and falls apart in the water.

This time, I used a ravioli cutter/sealer my in-laws gave us for Christmas. Used like a pizza cutter, it rolls along, sealing the edges and cutting the ravioli apart in one quick motion. I was dubious, and I explained to my daughter that “this probably won’t work, and we might end up having to just make pasta noodles and use our filling as a sauce.”

Much to my surprise and delight, the little cutter did a brilliant job! I’ve never had ravioli go so quickly (even in spite of the fact the power went out half way through dinner preparation)—we rolled out big sheets of dough, dolloped them with filling, topped them with a second sheet, and ran the cutter along the edges. Slick as…

And the taste? We topped it with a sauce of butter, garlic, rosemary, sage, and dried tomatoes. Fresh Parmesan cheese grated onto it at the table, and it was absolutely divine!

Unfortunately, with the power out, I got no photographs of the finished ravioli, but we had a delightful candlelight dinner—quite appropriate for glorious homemade pasta.