Mushroom and Spinach Ravioli

Last night I tried my hand at making ravioli for the first time... it is hard.  Rolling the dough definitely becomes the worst part after the first thirty minutes, it's just so... elastic.  And refuses to roll out.  Stretch, dang you!  My arms are still sore from all the rolling.

Recipe at Allrecipes.com: Mushroom and Spinach Ravioli

Here's our ingredients, lined up for a mugshot.

This is my first time making homemade noodles, so I'll admit I was a little apprehensive!  It's pretty straightforward, though.  Measure your flour and salt, mix your egg (and any other wet ingredients), then combine and turn out onto a floured pastry cloth.  Then knead.  And knead.  And knead.  And knead.  

And knead some more.

Until you get something along the lines of this, a smooth ball of dough.  The instructions say to wrap it up and let it rest, so I moved on to making the filling, because I'm an impatient kind of person like that.

Mushrooms, onions and garlic all sauteing together nicely.  This made the house smell delicious, by the way.

After the mushroom mixture cooked, I added in the spinach, cream cheese and parmesan.  I didn't have any shredded mozzarella so we just did cream cheese, mushroom, spinach and parmesan cheese ravioli...shhh don't tell my husband.  Oh wait, he reads this.  Oh well.  Sorry honey!

When I took this picture I had just rolled out my dough ball and was thinking "huh, this is actually pretty fun".  Silly me, I didn't realize that I would have to roll this dough out several times and each time it would become more and more resistant to my rolling attempts, much like a certain stubborn dog.  I cut out circles using a drinking glass, then rolled those out again.  There's a lot of rolling involved in this recipe.

After rolling out the circles, I plopped a tablespoon of filling in the center.  Doesn't that look pretty?

I love these photos, because they scream quintessential ravioli pictures to me.  The puffy pillows, the decorative edges...you can't see the person behind the camera going crazy trying to roll out the dough (which is becoming increasingly aggressive each time I use it).

Ravioli pile!  After I got tired and stopped I boiled  what I had for a few minutes and to my immense surprise, none of them split open.  Victory!

I served ours with marinara sauce, not the chive butter sauce - I have to stick with the classics. (Yes, there is spaghetti in there as well.  We had some leftover spaghetti I had to find a use for!) I was surprised at how full I felt after eating 3-4 of these - they're actually really filling.  Overall it was really really good.    Bonus points: vegetarian!  The recipe was right, I totally didn't miss the meat.  Would I make it again?  Probably not, unless I have a ton of energy that day.  Or get a pasta roller.