Fresh pasta, ADORED

I may be in love.
Last night, I decided to whip out my grandmother's old pasta roller. I dragged it home in late May when we returned from our San Diego trip. It got put in the laundry room, which got worse and worse on cleanliness until I finally cleaned it yesterday. It's not that I didn't want to use it; just other things came first because of the laundry room mess. With the mess cleaned, I could experiment with another project.

The other thing which got me all ambitious? A good recipe. Thank you The Kitchn for your fabulous pasta recipe. Oh my. The tips (like to knead for 15 minutes?) were perfect. I did find out that it has to be 3 medium-large eggs... I used small-medium eggs, so I needed 4. I wish egg size was more often included in recipes, but I digress...

This has been a week where I'm trying to spend little to no money. We have a $25 gift card to Safeway, so I used that yesterday to get ricotta and plain yogurt (and then blew a bunch more on stupid cat food), so $17 total. STUPID cats. Ignoring the cats, it was like $3.50 total... not bad, and all was covered by the gift card. Woo!

Trying to spend little to no money has made me realize all the many things we do have in our house. With a bit of planning, we could easily make what we have work for a long while and not shop. I'm not saying I want to clean out my supplies, but I do want to make sure I use what we have, you know?

I had some good sausage in the freezer, so I de-cased it and cooked it up. I used part of it (used the rest on slow cooker lasagna which cooked throughout the night), and also mixed in homemade pesto and ricotta.

Then, it was time to make the ravioli. The dough had been kneaded, and it was ready. I cut off a half-inch sliver (so it was about 2"x4"x1/2"), and ran it through the machine, hand-cranking. First, you roll it through on the lowest setting. Then you go smaller and smaller, making your pasta thinner and thinner. I went to setting 4, which seemed to be about what is the typical thinness for ravioli. It went up to 6! I think that has to be making phyllo dough or something.

I got pretty good at making the dough the same width of the item I was using to make the pasta circles-- a can of corn, if you must know. I need to find a circle cutter! The roller was great because all the circles were the same width!

Then I put the filling in. Using a bit of water, I wet the edges on one half, and then flipped the ravioli over and pinched it shut. I happened to have a pasta crinkle press, so I used that to really seal the deal and make it look purdy.

I set them all up on my drying racks. I wanted them to dry a little bit so that they wouldn't stick together in the freezer or wouldn't stick together in the boiling water. If they had sat in a bowl, mushed, together, they would have gotten sticky.

They only took a few minutes to cook in boiling water. I scooped them out, put a little bit of olive oil and some Parmesan cheese on top, and voila.

Oh my. This will be done again.