Homemade Pumpkin Ravioli

I’ve been trying for some years to make the perfect homemade ravioli. The problem is that here in Germany it is somehow difficult to get vegetarian ravioli. We buy pre-made tortellini without any trouble. Yesterday I came home from work early and the sun was shining brightly into my kitchen (which is unusual given where I live) and I saw the pumpkin I had recently bought on the counter (my newly installed counter!). While drinking a cup of tea I decided to make myself some pumpkin ravioli. Finally, it turned out to my satisfaction so here I am sharing the recipe with you.

If you live somewhere where it is hard to get ravioli this is definitely for you. You can stuff it with whatever is available. You just need to have a lot of time.

Tastes great served with homemade tomato sauce.

Preparation time: 3 hours (can be made in advance and refrigerated or frozen); Serves 3-4 (according to my daughter)

Ingredients:

Pasta Dough

2	Eggs
2 tbsp.	Cold water
2 tsp.	Olive oil
1 tsp.	Salt
2 cups	White flour

Filling

350 g	Butternut squash
2	Garlic cloves
1 tbsp.	Finely chopped oregano
175 g	Tofu
	Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

The first thing to do is to make the dough for the pasta. Mix all the liquids together in a small bowl. I use my indispensable mini-whisk.

Next beat the liquid together with a cup of flour with an electric whisk. Once it was all combined you have to knead it with another cup of flour. I had to pull mine out of the machine and knead it by hand. You can knead it with a machine if you like. My machine is too big for such a small bit of dough so I HAD to do it by hand (I hate kneading). Knead it for about 8 minutes or until the dough is smooth.

Then I put the dough in a bowl and covered it with a plate. You can cover it with anything but it is important that you let the dough sit for a while and that you cover it to prevent it drying out. Mine sat for about 30 minutes while I was preparing the filling.

The best way to cook the pumpkin is to bake it. However, I decided to steam mine. I find that I put my oven on all too quickly. Many of my Sri Lankan family and friends are reluctant to use their ovens because of the large amount of electricity that they use. The electricity supply is also not always reliable and fluctuates quite badly. So since I have a lot of friends and family out there I decided to make this recipe without using my oven. I didn’t boil the pumpkin because it would get too soggy.

For this particular recipe I used butternut squash (known as Dubai Wattakka when I was a child). I assume you could use any other type of pumpkin, although I would stay clear of the stringy type. I peeled my pumpkin and cut it into 1 cm cubes. (The smaller you cut your pumpkin the quicker it will steam.)

Then put it in a steamer and steam it for about 15 minutes, or until tender. You do not want it to be mushy but you do want to be able to mash it. 

While the pumpkin was steaming I ran out to my herb patch and brought in some fresh oregano leaves. If you can’t get oregano don’t despair, you can use any herb or spice to give the pumpkin some taste. Half a tea spoon of dried herbs would also work well. If there are no herbs available try some spices. Curry power, garam masala or ground mustard should give it a South Asian taste (I’ll be trying the mustard next time because I absolutely love pumpkin with mustard. Probably be good with a coconut milk based sauce. Hmmm….).

Finely chop the oregano and the garlic. We really like garlic so I put in two cloves. The filling tasted really strong but once it was in the ravioli it was perfect.

I didn’t want the pumpkin to be too mushy so I mashed the pumpkin roughly with a fork ...

and then added the herbs, garlic salt and pepper. To add a bit of protein to our diet I added some crumbled tofu. You can omit this or replace it with feta cheese, although I think that the texture of the tofu was much better in the end. Once I had mixed this all together I realized that the filling was to soggy, there was too much moisture in it. To get rid of the extra moisture I put the filling in a small saucepan and cooked it over high heat for a few minutes. I stirred it constantly because I did not want it to burn. I am sure I could have dried it out even further but there was no time for that. I can’t really explain how dry your filling should be but if it resembles mush then it is definitely too wet. What this will do is soak through your dough and cause it to break. So if you’re making your ravioli and the pastry breaks it might be because of the moisture in your filling.

By now the pastry has been sitting long enough. On a well-floured surface roll out the pastry until it is very, very thin. I could almost see the counter through my dough. If you have a pasta press then use it to save yourself some time. You can also get molds to make your ravioli with, definitely a time saver. I used a round cookie cutter (5 cm) to cut my dough.

On to the dough I heaped half a teaspoon of filling leaving plenty of place around the edges.

Then I took another cut out piece and stretched it a bit because it needs to be larger than the one with the filling on it so that it covers the filling. Press the sides together very carefully. Make sure you have clean hands when you do this. Any filling on your hands will get onto the outside of the ravioli and you will have a mess. Place the finished ravioli on a surface dusted liberally with flour. Keep going until you are done with either all the dough or all the filling.

Try to cut your dough as sparingly as possible. If you re-roll the dough you will need to first knead it and then leave it to sit for at least 15 minutes so that it is elastic again. I only rolled mine twice and trashed the little bit of dough that was left.

Once you are done you can leave the ravioli to air dry for a bit. Make sure there is enough flour on them so that they don’t stick.

To cook them lower them into boiling water and cook for around 2 minutes. I don't have any pictures of the cooking process because my husband cooked them while I was out playing "soccer mum"!!

Serve with tomato, pesto or a white sauce. 

Half an Hour Vegetarian Pumpkin and Potato Soup

Well this one was never truly meant to be! My shopping schedule is all off due to the kids vacations and as usual I forgot that on Sunday the shops are closed. Something that I have never quite been able to get used to. The fridge was almost bare except for some butternut squash and a few potatoes. So I decided to throw them "all" together and make a soup. I happened to have half a loaf of bread left over from yesterday and a few cheeses so I figured we could manage.

Oh and I forgot to mention it was day 2 of the girls musical performance so I only had ... yes, you guessed it, 30 minutes to prepare dinner. When we picked up the girls their first question (as always) was "what are we having for dinner?". They were not too happy when I said soup and bread.

I pretty much grew up eating soup. My mum's soup is famous! I remember my aunt, uncle and cousins coming to visit one evening and they joined us for dinner quite sporadically. My mum made soup and my aunt asked my mum what she put in it because it was delicious. The reason that this stuck in my mind was that my mum made the soup from the beans left over from lunch! Actually whatever was left over from lunch went into the pot together with onions, garlic, water and a vegetable cube. It was then boiled, put in the liquidizer and served with bread and butter. Hmmm delicious... if you only knew! Okay that's not to say that my mum didn't make soups from scratch. She did that all the time, with spinach soup being our all time favourite. Always made with organically grown spinach, freshly plucked from the back garden. And in case you are wondering left over soups really do taste good, depending on what was left over of course!

Serves 4; Preparation time 30 mins.

Ingredients:

3 tbsp.	Olive Oil
1 small	Onion
2 cloves	Garlic
500 g	Butternut squash or Pumpkin
250 g	Potatoes
750 ml	Water
1	Vegetable cube
12 stems	Thyme
	Salt & Pepper

Method:

Soup is ultra easy to make. First peel the pumpkin and potatoes and then cube them. The smaller the better because they will cook quicker and be easier to pulverize at the end. Also dice the onion and the garlic.

Then take a large saucepan and heat it on high. Throw in the oil, onions and garlic and stir fry until soft. Around 1-2 minutes. Then add the pumpkin and potatoes and mix it well. Let it fry for 5 minutes or so, stirring to make sure it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. 

Add the water, vegetable cube, salt and pepper stir it all up, put the lid on and let it boil. Reduce the heat as necessary. 

Now I have this thyme plant left over from making the caramelized leek quiche so I decided to put some of that in too. But I really could not be bothered with picking the leaves off so I just took around 12 stems of about 7 - 8 cm length and chopped them up. I picked out a few of the harder stems once I was done chopping and threw the rest of the leaves into the bubbling pot.

The vegetables didn't have to boil for more than 10 minutes and they were done. I then pulled out my Kenwood stick mixer (Stab or Bamix depending on where you live and your age!), stuck it in the pot and mashed everything up. If you want a lumpy soup you can just use a potato masher. If you only have a liquidizer your in for bad luck because you can't put hot liquid in a traditional liquidizer. Actually there is a way around it. If you prepare the vegetables with a minimum amount of water you can then add cold water to them once they are cooked. This is usually cool enough to use in a liquidizer. However, afterwards you have to heat it up again. 

The girls just looked at the soup and said "what is it?" After I explained what was in it our oldest agreed to having one soup spoon full and the youngest demanded half a spoon. But half spoons don't exist (according to my husband) so she had to make do with a whole spoon. Then they tried it and couldn't get enough of it! I had to fight to have some left over so that I could pack it up as a school lunch for the next day!!! So it was successful (otherwise I would not be sharing it here, no?).