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.