19 March 08 re: making asparagus ravioli

mb:

Like most foodies I know, I have about a million subscriptions to food magazines. OK, that's not really true. In reality I have subscriptions to Cook's Illustrated, Cooking Light, Fine Cooking, and Gourmet. Each of these magazines is different and worthwhile in its own way. I love them all and can always find inspiration of some kind in their pages.

This month's Gourmet is filled with Italian food ... beautiful, delicious, simple Italian food. I couldn't stop drooling while flipping through its pages. But the recipe that appealed to me most out of the entire issue was right at the very beginning of the magazine. It was a simple picture of a bowl filled with broth. Floating in the middle of the broth were a few ravioli and a couple of asparagus tips. Nothing fancy, nothing overly visually stimulating, just a simple photograph with a couple-word description down at the bottom.

But after my initial flip-through of the magazine, I couldn't get that picture out of my head. The more I thought about it the more I knew that I had to make it. When something gets stuck in my head like that, I know it's a sign.

While fresh pasta is about the most delectable thing in the world, it's also an extremely time‑consuming process and there just aren't enough minutes in the day for me to be making my own pasta by hand. But as it was fairly obvious that fresh pasta was a must for this recipe, I called my local Italian food shop (Capone's for those of you in the Boston area) and found out how much they charged for sheets of pasta. $3.95/pound for thin sheets seemed well worth it. I asked the man who runs the shop how much would be reasonable for two people, and followed his advice by getting a pound.

Making the filling was incredibly easy. First I lobbed the tips off the asparagus spears and set them aside. Then I very gently cooked the stems in a pot of chicken broth with the rind from some parmesan tossed in there. The parmesan itself went into the food processor and was whirred up finely until it was almost the same consistency as corn meal. When the asparagus stems had cooked for a little while (just long enough that they were no longer crunchy, but definitely not soggy yet) they were thrown into the food processor as well, with a little salt and peper, and the entire thing was pulsed until it was a paste.

Yum. The filling was so delicious on its own that I'm pretty sure J and I could have sat down with a spoon each and finished the whole thing off in less than a minute. But I insisted on actually making the ravioli. What a killjoy, huh?

Now I took the beautiful sheets of pasta and lay them out on a lightly floured work surface. I dropped teaspoonfuls of the filling about an inch apart from each other on half of the sheet and then folded the other half over so that it created the upper layer. I then very carefully pressed around each of the lumps of filling, trying to get rid of all the air in between the layers (because then the ravioli are less likely to explode while cooking). For those of you who have never made ravioli, this is the hardest part. And for those of you who have, any tips for how to do a better job?

Now, if I was a super fancy person I would have used my ravioli cutter to make perfect scalloped edges around each of my beautiful raviolis. But I am not a super fancy person, and I don't even have a ravioli cutter, so I used a pair of kitchen shears and simply cut them into squares.

I then set the pot of chicken broth to boil again, and when it was, very gently placed the ravioli and the asparagus tips in. The nice part about fresh pasta is that it takes mere minutes to cook, so they were done moments later. The asparagus tips were very lightly cooked, still a tiny bit crunchy, and absolutely perfect.

This made the most elegant bowl of soup that I think has ever been produced in my house. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures because J and I were both too excited and ate everything immediately ... sorry. It was perfect, simple, incredibly gourmet, and yet totally down-home rustic food. It made me think of being in Italy, and of the impending move from winter to spring. It was green and salty and cheesy and I absolutely 100% cannot wait to make it again.

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