Note: If you’ve been gone or are new to the site, make sure to check out yesterday’s post for a New Year’s contest and giveaway! More info at the end of this post as well.

For some reason, the Unicyclist and I decided that this week would be a good one to tackle a more challenging dish for Urban Hennery’s Dark Days of Winter Challenge.

Perhaps the fact that it had been a full week of down time since the Christmas cookfest influenced our judgment.  Maybe it was the excitement of the new year, full of promise and potential.

Or maybe you can just chalk it up to pure lunacy.  That’s my vote, after having spent almost four hours in the kitchen yesterday trying to alternately craft/beat/and will perfect ravioli into existence.

I blame the Unicyclist.  I hate making dishes that involve rolling dough.  He, on the other hand, doesn’t mind them a bit.  Since he volunteered to handle the pasta dough, I agreed to step up our Dark Days cooking efforts and give butternut squash ravioli a whirl.  We started by roasting a butternut squash from our CSA in a 400-degree oven.  After it was perfectly soft and wonderfully fragrant, we scooped it into a bowl, mashed it up, and then added some chopped sage from the garden, some toasted and ground Arizona pecans from the Guadalupe farmers’ market, salt, pepper, and a little bit of leftover Pecorino Romano (not local).  Setting that aside, we went to work on the dough.  This is where things got sticky.  (No pun intended.)

First, we had to sort through the wheat berries we’d gotten from our CSA.  The baggie contained little odd bits of plant matter and some scraps of chaff, which all had to be picked out before we could make it into flour.  It wasn’t too laborious a process, however, and before long, everything was in the Vitamix, whirring away into a fine powder.  After consulting a cookbook for a pasta recipe, we added the appropriate amount of eggs, salt, and water…only to wind up with an incredibly dry, stiff dough that was almost impossible to work with.

We doubled the amount of water.

It was still excruciating.

We soldiered on, the Unicyclist throwing his whole body weight onto the rolling pin in a vain attempt to approximate a pasta-quality thinness.  There was rolling and re-rolling.  There was hole-patching.  There was slapping and stretching and pulling.  There was much passing of the rolling pin back and forth between the two of us.  And there was weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Let’s just say that we wound up with some very hearty ravioli, despite our best efforts.  These guys had perhaps more of the quality of a stuffed dumpling.  The last batch was easier, after I finally gave up and just went crazy with the water.  We probably quadrupled (at least) the amount of water the recipe called for, and that was the only thing that made it bearable.  I suspect that if we’d had a pasta machine and the chutzpa to have been freer with the water earlier on, the process would have been both less painful and more expedient.

The boiling of the ravioli went just fine, despite the fact that I had been particularly apprehensive about that step.  What if the ravioli cracked in the water and all the filling gushed out?  What if they stuck together into a mighty hockey puck?  What if they were overcooked?  Undercooked?  How would I know unless I cut into one?  Oh, the agony!

I needn’t have worried.  They did just fine.  The fact that they were of a somewhat industrial strength probably didn’t hurt any.

We wrapped the whole thing up by frying a few sage leaves in the fantastic Wildtree garlic-infused grapeseed oil my mom got me for Christmas.  We then used the leftover oil from frying the sage to pan-fry the ravioli and also to sautée some spinach from our CSA.  As you can see, we served the ravioli on a bed of the spinach (with a bit of the leftover squash filling) and topped it with the fried sage leaves and a sprinkling of toasted pecans.

It looks stunning, don’t you think?

But, you must be asking, how did it taste?

The truth is that the flavors were excellent together.  However, the thickness of the ravioli gave an overpowering, doughy feel to the whole dish.  It was an adventure, and one that will undoubtedly give us a greater appreciation for pasta in general, but I doubt we’ll be rushing to do this again any time soon.  At least, not until we get a pasta roller.

This is what it means to take risks in the kitchen: sometimes you wind up with perfection in a bowl, and sometimes you wind up with doughy ravioli.

But you learn.

Speaking of learning and kitchen experimentation, don’t forget to stop by the first Simple Spoonful contest and get a chance to win a cookbook from my own collection!  All entries must be in by tomorrow at midnight Pacific Time.