Garden Greens-Stuffed Ravioli for a Virtual Birthday Dinner Party

What a crazy time we're in, right?! Well, I wasn't about to let my 47th birthday go off without a dinner party. So, even though I couldn't have my friends over in this season of flattening the curve of the coronavirus and sheltering in place, I hosted a virtual dinner party and asked them to cook some pasta, open some wine, and sign in to chat. It definitely wasn't the same, but I still felt celebrated and it was nice to catch up with everyone.

My family and I had gone on a hike that morning. Public service announcement: When the trail goes from ridge to creek in 1100 ft elevation down...and the trail is one way...yeah, you're climbing that same 1100 ft up again. Happy birthday to me. It was a beautiful hike though.

And as soon as we got home, I had the boys wash their hands and roll up their sleeves and pull out the pasta maker* to make the ravioli while I kicked up my feet and relaxed with a book.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that my younger son created a garden for his IBMYP Personal Project this year. And the timing has been perfect for giving us greens during this shelter-in-place ordeal; I can stretch out store visits because I have fresh greens that he and Jake are harvesting daily. In any case, I wanted a ricotta-green filling for the homemade ravioli. He came in with some lacinto kale and I supplemented with some mizuna greens from a CSA delivery box I had.

Ingredients serves 4

Filling

• 2 C chopped garden greens
• 1/2 small onion, minced (approximately 1/4 C)
• 2 T butter
• 1 C ricotta cheese
• 3/4 C grated parmesan cheese
• 1 egg yolk
• freshly ground salt
• freshly ground pepper
• freshly grated nutmeg (appoximately 1/4 t)

Ravioli

• laminated dough (see this post)
• Also needed: flour, water in a spray bottle, ravioli cutter*

Serving

• sauce
• herbs
• more parmesan cheese for grating

Procedure

Filling

Heat butter in a small skillet. Add onions and cook until translucent, approximately 5 minutes. Stir in the greens. Salt to taste and cook for another minute.

Transfer garden greens mixture to a medium mixing bowl. Stir in remaining ingredients. Adjust seasonings to preference. Set aside.

Ravioli

Roll the dough to a thinness of 5 or 6 on the pasta machine. They rolled it through at a 2, first, then moved to a 5 which worked well for our purposes.

Lay the dough on a floured surface or parchment paper.

Place a mound of filling on the dough and spray the entire surface with water.

Lay another rolled dough over the top.

Press out any extra air to create a seal around the filling.

Using a ravioli cutter, cut around the filling carefully. Place the finished ravioli on a floured parchment-lined cookie sheet. Repeat until all of the dough or all of the filling has been used.

To cook these: drop them into salted, boiling water. Cook for four to five minutes. Gently remove them from the post and fold them into a sauce.

For this batch, I made a quick sauce with garlic, this cherry tomato sauce, and fresh basil. My proud pasta makers...

Here's a close-up of their creation!

I was rushed to sign in to the virtual chat and I completely blitzed on taking a shot of the ravioli with sauce - uneaten! Whoops. It was delicious.

*This blog currently has a partnership with Amazon.com in their affiliate program, which gives me a small percentage of sales if you buy a product through a link on my blog. It doesn't cost you anything more. If you are uncomfortable with this, feel free to go directly to Amazon.com and search for the item of your choice.