Scaffolded Success

Yes, I'm an educator, and yes, I use words like "scaffolded" when I talk about everything, including yesterday's afternoon of making ravioli and gnocchi FROM SCRATCH.  It was a scaffolded success because Anne helped me make everything.  She was my scaffold (training wheels).  We were making dinner for a bunch of friends, and it was a pretty ambitious menu; I couldn't have done it without Anne's help.  Not that making pasta dough is that difficult when you have the Kitchenaid attachment, or that making the filling is that difficult either.  What was difficult was handling the 3 foot long paper thin sheets of pasta as they stretch their way out of the machine.  With only two hands it's difficult to manage.  But after making the first quarter of the dough, I learned a few tricks.  

First off, after running the dough through a medium setting of the pasta roller, I cut the foot-and-a-half long sheet in half and worked with smaller portions.  They still stretched out long enough to make plenty of individual ravioli.  In addition, I was at first afraid of using too much flour on the dough, but the flour really helps the dough make it's way through the roller, so I made sure that the sheets were well floured after the first batch.  And finally, let's not underestimate the value of advance planning, i.e. knowing what you will do with the dough once it's stretched.  Having well-floured baking sheets out and ready for placement was crucial.  

So what type of ravioli did I make you ask?  The green filling you see above is a spinach ricotta, and the orange is a sweet potato filling.  With each ravioli went a different sauce.  With the spinach ricotta went a beurre blanc (and I must say I'm kinda grossed out about how much butter goes into that) and with the sweet potato went a brown butter, thyme and balsamic sauce.

Now for the gnocchi.  On Sunday night we joined Seth and some of his friends at a restaurant in San Francisco called Poesia.  Seth's sister Shai is dating the owner, an Italian man named Francesco, from the Calabria region of Italy.  The food was great, and because of the connection, we made friends with our waiter Luigi, who taught us how to make 5-minute gnocchi not with potato, but with ricotta!  Yes, I know you want the recipe, but I have to keep it secret for now...my competition is reading this!

So it took Anne and I about 2 hours to make all the pasta.  The pasta all tasted great - we definitely have room to improve: all the filling sorta looked like brains inside of the pasta when we took it out of the water.   Not sure how to give it that smooth glossy texture.  We were definitely tired at the end of the evening, but had a great dinner with our friends, who went right home and voted for me, which is why Tiffany and I are now tied.  Booya.