Saturday Breakfast

Forced creativity

It seems I always come up with better dishes when I force myself to work with what I’ve got lying around the house instead of running to the store. Limitations seem to sharpen my creativity. Inevitably potent ingredients that I bought months ago, like shrimp paste or fenugreek or anchovies are called upon. What comes out is more surprising and (usually) more pleasurable than the predictable patterns of cooking I tend to fall into when I have a blank slate. Both from the standpoint of eating, and preparing the food.

So I’ve been purposefully creating this situation for myself. Most recently it gave birth to some fairly tasty ravioli. I’d bought a large bag of semolina a while back for a bread recipe, it’s been taking up space on my counter ever since, and I’d just finished reading the ricotta article on Bittman’s blog and was looking for an excuse to make some.

For the filling, I ended up sauteing some onions and garlic and minced carrots along with some chicken breast, and finely diced some pepper-coated salami for extra punch, threw all of this in my food processor and then folded it into the fresh ricotta with a good helping of parmesan.

Sorry for the awful photo, messy hands.

The ravioli turned out very tasty, but a bit too thick (or ‘rustic’ as I prefer to call them). Next time I’ll use more regular flour and less semolina to make the dough a bit more delicate. I don’t have a fancy pasta attachment for my kitchenaid, and ended up rolling it out by hand which may have had something to do with the flawed texture as well.

I threw together what was supposed to be simplified tomato sauce, but ended up adding anchovies, as well as some breadcrumbs because it just tasted too watery. It turned out great, and worked pretty well with the ravioli, though butter, sage and parmesan would have been more appropriate perhaps.

There were 4-5 raviolis left over that I reheated in some beef broth the next day for lunch, and they turned out much better, less tough.