Pasta for when I don't have time

As opposed to hours on a Sunday, this one was 20 minutes on a weekday morning.

I made entirely too much filling for the raviolis, and you can't throw out that much cheesy goodness. Not Michael Landon joked that he wanted a homemade lasagna with the leftovers (he has an odd sense of humor), but I had already decided that was exactly what I wanted to do. And ricotta with raw egg couldn't exactly wait for another day off.

So to abbreviate the rest of the process, I skipped meat - I had enough cheese to make the American Heart Association sufficiently appalled in its absence. Also, the lasagna noodles, which don't sound like work until you're on your way home and really don't feel like stopping by the grocery store in shoes that need to come off two hours ago, and can be just as easily replaced with dried rotini.

While the water came to a boil (always with a lid on! takes half the time), I chopped up the leftover onion and garlic from my grilled tomato sauce in the food pro, and mixed those up with what little of that sauce was left over, a can of crushed tomatoes, more basil pesto, and more of my usual seasonings. Pulled the ravioli filling out of the fridge, grated a bunch of mozzarella, parm, romano and asiago. When in doubt, more cheese.

I layered sauce, mostly-cooked pasta, ricotta/filling and cheese, a few times until the top, finishing with sauce, grated cheeses, a little dusting of bread crumbs, and a little butter dabbed on top.

Perfect for a weeknight when you're too hungry to cook. Popped in the oven covered with foil for 30 min at 375, and another 15 with the foil off. Cheesy. Yum.

Pasta for when I have time

After a fairly lazy childhood, I've developed a type A personality that makes it difficult to relax on weekends. I can watch HGTV and drink coffee til noon with the best of them, but at some point I need to do something productive.

My to-do list is never-ending, and somehow cleaning the house never bubbles to the top. There's something kind of freeing about spending the entire day in the kitchen when I should be finishing sewing projects or refinishing the garage sale finds cluttering Not Michael Landon's garage.

So I found myself last Sunday with a bunch of tomatoes passing their prime, and the will to turn them into something tasty. Our pathetic excuse for a summer had left me with enough for a decent meal-and-leftovers portion of sauce. As for a pasta, with a full day ahead I figured I could be ambitious and go for ravioli.

Not Michael Landon likes to make fun of my reliance on Joy, but I used it here as I usually do, for a reference rather than a recipe. I've had some trouble with fresh tomato sauces before, I usually burn them before I can get them to thicken. I thought about roasting them first, but with the mercury pushing 90 degrees inside (yeah, finally, after my vines have given up), turning on the oven didn't sound appealing. Joy had a grilled tomato sauce, much better idea.

I tossed the tomatoes with a little olive oil, salt & pepper, and after checking with Not Michael Landon that I'd turned the thing on properly (seriously, I need to cook meat more often), I just popped 'em right on the grill. I would recommend doing this over foil in hindsight. We have these neat stainless steel grates that kept the tomato juice from putting out the fire, but it made a heck of a mess. Another thing I could have done was peel the tomatoes, they ended up kinda stringy in the finished sauce. They would have popped right off after cooking.

I needed onion and garlic, and wasn't planning on cooking the sauce much once I was done on the grill, so I made a little foil pocket (also with oil, s&p) and stuck them on as well. They took longer than the tomatoes, but didn't need as much babysitting. As everything finished, I dropped it in the blender, and then took it inside to whiz up with more s&p, my usual spaghetti sauce spices (oregano, parsley, dried lemon peel, and a dash of nutmeg) and twice my usual ice cube of basil pesto. I thought more basil would add to the summery taste of fresh grilled tomatoes.

So, ravioli. I think it means "work" in Italian. Joy had boring ideas of meat filling, so I figured cheese would work. But even the cheese only called for ricotta and a smidgen of parm. At the grocery store, I checked out the ingredients list on a store-bought 4-cheese ravioli (ricotta, mozzarella, romano, parm), and came home with fontina, parm, romano, and asiago, in addition to whole milk for making ricotta. Go big or go home.

Ricotta is a cinch, but it takes for-ev-er to warm up, and needs constant babysitting. If you're not crazy, just buy the stuff, Martha's not watching. I mixed all the cheeses up with some egg and seasonings per-ish Joy, and then set on the long journey of making the pasta. I realized I hadn't even used my pasta roller since we moved, and boy how time made me forget how long it takes. By this time, I was getting hungry.

Luckily once the little pillows of cheesy goodness were made, we were at the home stretch. They needed to rest some, but the first ones I had made were ready by the time I finished. While they were boiling, I warmed up the sauce and then let them finish cooking a few minutes in it. I was so impatient by the end that I did undercook them a bit, but on the plus side, they make for perfect leftovers today at lunch.

Just about anything tastes wonderful after that long in the kitchen, but I was pleasantly surprised at how the filling flavor stood up to the bold sauce. Two cheeses. Pshaw, Joy.