Ravioli!

I made ravioli from scratch!  Sometimes I even amaze myself.  =)  I stumbled on a recipe for it the other day and thought, “I could make that!”.  I decided I would try my hand at make the ricotta as well.  We have Alpine Goats here on the farm that produce an abundance of milk.  Up to this point, Cam has done all the cheese making around our house.  I watch him spend several hours, or even days in the process and it's never appealed all that much to me.  Heck, with aged cheeses, you can wait years before you taste the fruit of your labor!  But, amazingly, ricotta is super easy to make!  It’s like the easiest cheese ever!  And, you can try this at home!  You can use cow’s milk, too.  I only had a quart of milk on hand and that made about a cup of cheese.  All you do is raise the temperature to 185, add a Tbsp of apple cider vinegar per quart, stir, and drain into a colander double-lined with cheesecloth.  That’s it!  After 20 minutes of draining, you have ricotta cheese ready to use!  Aghhh!  How could it be that simple!? Are you as excited as I am!?  Probably not.  Anyway….  So, I followed a recipe I found in Hobby Farms magazine of all places, for the dough.  The hardest part about that was rolling out the dough. 

 

After tasting our ravioli, I decided I should have rolled out the dough thinner.  Live and learn.  I rolled out the dough, scored it, scooped in my filling of homemade ricotta, garlic, onion, and some fresh chopped spinach, and put the other layer on top.

 

I cut the squares using a pizza cutter.  I don’t have any fancy ravioli equipment, so I just used a fork to pinch the edges of the squares together.  

  I boiled them for 8 minutes and, voila! Ravioli.  So, to recap, I made the cheese, pasta dough, rolled it out, filled it, cut it, pinched it, boiled it.  Then, I’m a little embarrassed to say, after all that, I poured on a JAR of RAGU spaghetti sauce.  But, it was really tasty!