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.

The Ocean and World's Best Lasagna

So we took our vacation to the ocean and it was lovely.  We drove for about 3 hours to reach a small tourist-y town with approximately 300 hotels and one grocery store (these are accurate numbers); the entire town was small enough for us to walk around in one day.  Our motel was a little local place and to my immense surprise (having stayed there when I was a kid) our room did not include an oven.  Which meant we had to microwave our beautiful lasagna and watch it turn to mush (sadface... I'll be so happy when we finally get a new oven).  It was still delicious, just... ugly.  Really ugly.  We killed the day relaxing (I promised myself no timelines!), walking around the beach, walking to the grocery store up the street (that still had working payphones), and wandering in and out of the dozens of tourist trap shops (toy stores, souvenirs, candy and ice cream)... when we were finally tired of walking (from about 12 to 7), we came back and went for a swim (I love swimming), had our lasagna, wandered back out and had giant ice cream cones (I opted for mint chocolate chip and cookie dough and A selected birthday cake and rocky road... I really want to try making rocky road at home sometime, it can't be that hard, right?).  All four flavors were delicious (possibly made tastier by the atmosphere... I mean seriously, how can you not enjoy ice cream surrounded by homemade fudge and saltwater taffy?)  After that we wandered back to the room and promptly fell asleep (it was a big day for us).  The next day, we took a walk on the beach (did I mention the beach was within walking distance of our room?  So awesome!) in the morning when it was stormy and grey, and pretty much devoid of other life forms except for the occasional seagull.  The drive back was nice, though at the halfway point we hit the heatwave and I really really really (really!!) wanted to go back to the ocean (with its 60 degree weather...ahhh).

So the lasagna mentioned above was a recipe pulled from (you guessed it) allrecipes.com; World's Best Lasagna.  I concur with this title - this really is the best lasagna I've ever had (and that's including the fact that I had to microwave it because our room only came with a hotplate, not a full stove!) What I really like is the bite after each, uh, bite, something just a little spicy (I think it's the pepper!  Granted, I put a little more than the recipe called for in mine...) that brings your tastebuds to attention.  I love this recipe.  I am definitely filing this one in my own cookbook.

Portobello Burgers!

So last night I tried making Portobello Mushroom burgers.  This is totally a first for us (our only other foray into vegetarian meals has been eggplant parmesan); multiple sources confirmed the mushroom has the consistency of hamburger and "even if you eat meat you won't miss it in this burger".  We'll see σ___σ (this is my skeptical face)

Portobello Mushroom Burgers from Allrecipes.com

 Here are the mushroom caps and all our marinade ingredients!  I washed the mushrooms and removed the gills because those creep me out.  Mushrooms with gills.  Like fish.  Ew. 

Since I was only making 2 burgers instead of 4, I cut the marinade down by half as well.  I threw soy sauce and worcestershire in there along with onion powder just because I could.  So there.

Here is a mushroom, happily sitting in its marinade.  I let them sit for about 20 minutes while I ran around doing other things (laundry, cleaning).  I love recipes that I can forget about - it's why I'm such great friends with my slow cooker.

Since I don't have a grill (shame) I ended up cooking these guys on the stove.  I'm happy to report that they shrink as they cook so what starts out as a giant mushroom-zilla ends up being a rather manageable cap in the end.  Sidenote: this recipe makes your house smell delicious.  Seriously.  My mouth was watering before the food was even done.

I also decided hey, why not grilled onions? and tossed those in with the provolone-covered patties.  Mmmm.  So good.  They smelled like the ridiculously huge burgers you can get at the fair, that are like the size of your head.  I love those burgers.

Viola - the finished product!  I toasted the onion buns, whipped up an aioli sauce, sliced some pickles (seriously I have a thing for pickles... husband always jokes he'll never be able to tell if I'm pregnant because I already eat pickles with everything) and smothered it all in onions.  Is there any way this burger could not be delicious? (The answer is no.)  We ate these babies with a garden salad and baked potato, and I will totally be the first to admit I was surprisingly full coming away from a meal with no meat.


So this was pretty darned good, though as someone who was raised on beef burgers I have to say there is definitely a difference.  But at only 200~ calories you're going to have a hard time going wrong with this.  I think next time (read: tonight.  We are a household that looooves leftovers) I'll cook them longer; I tried 40 minutes on the stove but the center was still very mushroomy (sides were really soft and easy to eat, though).

Pie, pretzels and lost dogs

Our guests!

We took our dogs for a walk yesterday and came back to our street only to have another dog run up to us and follow us back to our house.  We decided we'd leash him up (he had no collar) and walk him down the street to see if anyone was looking for a dog.  Which is how we met the second one (on the left).  The lesson I choose to take away from this is if you try to help, you will just end up doing more work.  (They were so cute, though.  They both belonged to one guy who was running up and down the street looking worried.)

So I'm looking back at our weekend and we... actually had a pretty busy one.

We took the giant piece of glass off of the hallway bathroom, for starters.

Surprise!  Yes those walls disgust me, too...

Then we went to a nearby farmer's market, which was totally rad.  I loooove farmer's markets.  Know what I don't love?  Ten thousand strollers.  Everywhere we went there were strollers.  It was stroller city.

But that's forgivable, because they had giant pretzels and cupcakes:

Also on the table: I had no internet yesterday but I did write a post!  It's after the jump...

Sloppy Joes

Last night I made sloppy joes, which normally would not merit a blog post but I found a recipe from allrecipes.com that allowed me to skip the canned sauce and make my own using mustard, onions, garlic and ketchup (mostly ketchup).  It's never crossed my mind to make my own sloppy joe mix and I've always used the canned stuff.  Intriguing!  My husband has made this before and it was delicious, so I decided to try my hand at it.