Carb Day- Cilantro Pumpkin Ravioli and Blackberry Granola Whole Wheat Muffins

 

 

Yesterday I woke up with the urge to make food. This doesn't happen to me a lot, actually, but I found a couple of cookbooks in the front closet that I had forgotten we had. One was The Cook's Encyclopedia for Vegetarian Cooking, a small bargain book we bought at Barnes and Noble, and the other was Small Batch Baking, which we bought at Half Price Books.

As I was flipping through the former I noticed a recipe for Cilantro Ravioli with Pumpkin, Garlic, and Sun Dried tomato filling. Our CSA basket came with two bunches of cilantro this week. One I had already used to make an Asian inspired Cilantro-Mint Pesto, the other was wilting rapidly. We also had many cans of pumpkin in the pantry, as well as the fat-free Ricotta, the garlic, and the sun dried tomatoes the recipe called for. So I decided to give it a try.

Eric and I had tried to make ravioli once in the distant past, but we lacked a pasta machine or even a rolling pin. Using a Nalgene we managed to roll out thick pasta pieces which didn't adhere to each other well and refused to fully cook. On top of those we put a tomato cream sauce that turned out pink. We chucked the whole dinner, if I recall correctly.

Now I had a pasta machine. So I dug it out and put the 1 cup flour, 2 eggs, and 1/2 cup packed cilantro leaves in my food processor. After mixing it together I discovered as I tried to dump it out onto a floured cutting board that this was not nearly enough flour. Not nearly enough. So I kneaded in a bunch more until I could roll it up in a ball, put it in a baggie, and put it in the fridge to "set." While this was happening I had put four cloves of garlic in their skin in the oven at 400 to roast.

Well, I was sitting there, the oven was hot, it was morning, and so I thought, hey, what does the Small Batch book have to offer?

What it had was a recipe for Blueberry Whole Wheat Granola muffins. We didn't have blueberries, but we did have blackberries.

It had a complicated strategy for assembling the ingredients. I had a lazy person strategy (throw them all in bowl at the same time):

1 egg

1/3 cup whole wheat

1/3 cup AP flour

1 tsp Baking Powder

1/4 tsp Baking soda

pinch of salt

ground nutmeg

1/2 cup granola

1/4 cup nonfat buttermilk (who has this on hand? I used skim)

1/4 brown sugar

1 tbsp vegetable oil (used safflower)

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/3 cup blackberries

Mixed all together and put in greased muffin pan. The recipe says it will make 4, but it made six small muffins for me.

Here's the thing, I would increase the amount of blackberries, and since these blackberries weren't terribly sweet, I add some honey or more brown sugar too. The whole wheat made them dense and a little bit flavorless. Not bad, just not awesome. Maybe if you had sweeter granola? The granola didn't really add much that I could tell. I was using Flax Plus Pumpkin Seed, which has the advantage of being nut free, so Smudgy could have  a muffin.

Muffins in the oven I returned to the pasta task at hand.

 

 

So the filling for the pasta was:

4 roasted garlic cloves (I used green garlic from my CSA basket)

1 can pumpkin

1/2 cup fat free ricotta

4 sun dried tomatoes in olive oil chopped up

pepper

Having put this together, I then proceeded to figuring out how to make pasta.

The first thing I would say is that even after I got my dough ball out of the refrigerator I realized it was still WAY too wet. I had to keep mixing in flour until it would roll through the machine. The other thing I discovered is that even though the recipe says to run it through on the thinnest setting, as the pasta machine explains you have to start with the thickest setting, 1, run it through five or six times, and then run it through each narrower setting 1 time each. I also discovered that if I went past 7 (9 being the thinnest) the pasta fell apart when filling was put in it. So I stopped at 7. Then, when it's rolled out, I used a glass to cut circles. Put filling on one circle, another circle on top of that, and I sealed the edges with water.

There was a lot of pumpkin filling left, so we put it in the fridge. This will prove important later. 

Then I did something stupid. I stacked the ravioli on a plate to sit in the fridge until dinner. So by dinner time many of them were impossible to pry apart. These stupid ravioli that I had labored over where just shooting filling out everywhere in a congealed plate sized lump. I got upset and had a glass of wine. Eric pried as many as he could apart and dumped the rest into the pot.

We decided that even if the filling didn't last as a filling, we could make a cream sauce with the leftover pumpkin mix. So I made a white sauce (1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour, skim milk) and added the pumpkin sauce. I was seasoning the sauce and it was bland, so I was adding salt and pepper and it went from bland to way too peppery in one twist of the pepper mill. Which was also a bummer.

We made a salad with our CSA lettuce mix, carrots, plus cucumber and cherry tomatoes, and some Alexia frozen whole wheat rolls.

The pasta was edible, but not very good. The sauce might have been good had I not over peppered it. All told, though I enjoyed figuring out how to use the pasta machine, will acquire better flour and try again, I found dinner frustrating. I would not make that recipe again, I don't think.