11.15.2009

 

Ravioli two ways

It turns out that this fall's pumpkin theme hasn't been so much every Friday as semi-regularly sometime over the weekend, with one or two weeks seeing no pumpkin activity whatsoever. Still, it's fun to use so much pumpkin and search around for new recipes. I baked another batch of muffins last weekend, making 12 muffins without chocolate chips and a mini loaf with chocolate chips for a friend's birthday. The muffins disappear quickly around here, I tell ya.

This weekend, I browsed FN's collection of pumpkin recipes, and I found a couple I was eager to try. The first ended up being part of tonight's dinner: Mario's Pumpkin Lune with Butter and Sage. (FYI: lune = moons = ravioli.) Some of the pumpkin recipes are a little vague on how much pumpkin you should use; this one, for instance, says to roast a small/one-pound pumpkin, so I just guessed that that would be about equivalent to 1.5 cups of pumpkin puree. Rather than making my own pasta dough, I used refrigerated egg roll wrappers, and I was able to get nine 2-inch circles out of each square. I mixed up the filling and tasted it, and the balsamic vinegar seemed to overpower everything else, so I started to get a little disappointed that maybe I wasn't going to like it at all. A little balsamic goes a LONG way on my taste buds. I added a little honey and some sage to the pumpkin mixture, and even though it still tasted odd, I hoped for the best and assembled the ravioli. Rather than using all butter for the sage sauce, I used half butter and half olive oil, and it was very well balanced with the fresh sage. I was really pleased that the balsamic vinegar mellowed once everything mingled together in cooking, and I ended up liking it quite a bit. I ended up with a lot of extra filling because I made a small recipe of ravioli, so the rest of the filling is now in the freezer for some future dinner engagement.

At the point when I was mixing up the filling and started to worry that I was going to hate the finished product, I asked Jack to go to the store to get some ricotta so I could also make some more traditional ravioli. I filled them with ricotta, parmesan, mozzarella, and a bit of pesto, then decided I'd deep fry them (hey, why not?) and we could dip them in tomato sauce. I used a lot of pans and other preparatory dishes for the meal, but it was worth it. Kent really loved the fried cheese ravioli, though he wouldn't try the pumpkin stuff — that was okay, because he's normally really good about trying a bite of new things if we encourage him, and I didn't want to push it tonight.

The other pumpkin recipe I want to try soon is this Pumpkin Mousse, which sounds like a lighter, mellower cousin of pumpkin pie. And it looks so lovely in those wine glasses.

Surfing the Food Network website without first seeing the recipes on TV is somewhat new to me, but I'm trying to embrace it, because we're about to take the big step of dropping down to limited cable (channels 1-22) and getting Netflix. Netflix has a lot of full seasons of TV shows that I want to see, but I'm a little sad when I think about not being able to watch the Food Network or The Daily Show. And Jack won't have ESPN. So many Daily Show clips end up on YouTube, and we don't watch as much of those other stations as we used to anyway, so I think it won't be as huge of a lifestyle change as it would be for some families. At least we'll still have PBS and all the big networks (ABC, CBS, etc.), where most of our favorite shows are anyway. Hopefully we'll grow a little, and we'll have so much easier access to indie films and other obscure things. Plus, we'll save money, which is the main reason we're doing it. Sigh. Saving money is hard.

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Before we moved into this house, we didn't have cable at all. I've gotten used to it the past couple of years, because I like DVR-ing shows. Brad has ordered some box that uploads stuff from the internet that you can hook right up to the TV. His goal is to get rid of cable, and just watch all of our shows off this little box. We shall see...
 
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