My Green Home and Garden

It is a time consuming process to make ravioli from scratch.  To expedite the process, wonton wrappers can be  purchased in the grocery store frozen section and used instead of making the pasta.  After that, the filling is super easy.

Whole Wheat Pasta

Ingredients:
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup white flour
2 eggs
1/4 tsp salt
water

First of all, I have to give kudos to Sugarlaws for posting the best whole wheat pasta directions that I’ve seen so far which I modified a bit for my ravioli.

Directions:

• Sift together the flour and salt with a fork until well combined.Note:  You can use two cups of whole wheat flour for this recipe, but be aware that it takes more water, is more difficult to work with, harder to roll thinly, and dries out faster.  I’ve done it, but I end up wasting a lot of flour in the process
• Make a well in the center of your flour mixture and break the eggs into it.  Stir this mixture until the egg is well distributed (it’s going to look like a bowl of pebbles instead of a dough)
• Add the water one tablespoon at a time, tossing the mixture of flour and egg with a fork, checking after every tablespoon to see if the dough is formed (you know when it’s formed when you can make a ball with some of it and it stays mostly together, but you don’t want it to be sticky)
• Once the dough is formed, place it on a flour dusted surface, and begin rolling it out with a rolling pin (if your dough starts sticking to your rolling pin, you can sprinkle more flour on top of it [you might want to flip it over too, cause if it’s sticking on top then it’s probably also sticking to the counter]).
• If the dough starts to contract when you’re trying to roll it flatter, let it rest for 20 minutes or so and then go back to rolling it.  The final dough should be between 1/16th and 1/8th of an inch.
• Cut the edges of the dough off to form a rectangle and place the scraps in a bowl in the fridge so they won’t dry out; you can use them to make more ravioli squares when you’re done with the main chunk of dough.  Divide your rectangle of dough into an even number of 2in X 2in squares.

Sweet Potato and Sage Filling

Ingredients:
two cups of sweet potato (one big sweet potato)
4-6 leaves of Sage
2 tablespoons of brown sugar
2 tablespoons of melted butter

Directions:

• Boil the peeled sweet potato until it’s super tender.  Then drain and mash.
• Add brown sugar and melted butter to sweet potato
• Add minced sage to the mixture (a little bit goes a long way!)
• scoop 1 tablespoon of mixture onto the center of the ravioli square.  Dip your clean finger into a bowl of water and dab the water around the edges of the ravioli square, then add another square on top of it and seal the edges with the tip of a fork.  coat the finished ravioli in flour (I use semolina) and place on a cooling rack to dry for an hour.

Note:  Sugar Pumpkin (or canned pumpkin) can be substituted for sweet potato and it still tastes delicious.  Also, to make things faster, you can just toss all of these ingredients into a food processor and then you don’t have to worry about mincing the sage.

After the hour of drying, the ravioli can be placed in the freezer or you can toss the ravioli into a pot of boiling water.  Pasta floats when it is finished cooking.

While the ravioli is cooking, you can prepare a butter sage sauce by melting a stick of butter over the stove in a small pot with 10-15 leaves of minced sage.  Place the ravioli on your plate and pour the butter mixture over it and serve!  I can’t for the life of me remember the delicious buttery white wine that I used with this recipe…it was something I had never heard of before and started with an “f” I think.

This makes 3-4 servings of ravioli.  You might have some filling left over depending on how thinly you rolled your dough. I think it’s good enough to eat by itself.

Enjoy!