Kitchen Anecdotes

photo credit: ImipolexG

As a lover of Italian cuisine, I decided to make ravioli from scratch. After all, my boyfriend bought me the basic pasta machine as a gift (I’ve discovered that constant harassment works with him). Besides, they make it look so easy on the TV that you just go, “yeah, I can do that”. Well, it wasn’t a complete disaster but damage assessments were necessary. I saw on a TV show that you can just put the dough ingredients on the food processor and away you go. I pulsed and pulsed and kinda got the dough. I kneaded and was ready for the machine… or was I?

My pasta machine is the classic manual metallic one. Cute, but user unfriendly. I started rolling the dough through the machine. Well, the handle kept coming off. Frustrating! Then I couldn’t get the dough to roll through the middle. Instead, it kept going towards the edges of the machine, causing it to jam. Undoubtedly, this also causes the handle to come off. I ended up using a rolling pin to finish the damn thing.

To add insults to injury, I made the filling too aqueous. This translated into a big mess. The kitchen already looked as if a snow storm had passed by from all the flour (because you have to keep adding flour and flour and more flour to prevent the dough from sticking). Now, the filling was escaping the amorphous ravioli. It was really hard to prevent this spill. It didn’t help that I do not own a pasta cutter, not to mention that all the pasta sheets were different in their lack of form.

Now, I have to admit this was really stupid on my behalf ’cause I knew I made a spinach sauce and insisted at all cost to use it as the filling. Although this event has reduced my lifespan, it seemed to amuse the hell out of my boyfriend. I will certainly try again.