Homemade Spinach and Cheese Ravioli

Homemade spinach and cheese ravioli do take a little time but making your own pasta dough is right up there on the satisfaction scale with baking bread. You know what’s in it. It’s fresh and the taste is far superior to store-bought. Best of all, it’s surprisingly easy.

You might notice, if you stopped by earlier, that I am posting twice today. And that’s because, despite my prior Sunday Supper commitment (I’m hosting for the very first time, guys! So excited about this week’s theme: Saving Summer!) I couldn’t turn down a request from my fellow blogger Colleen from Souffle Bombay to talk about cookbooks and what they mean to me.

I am a card-carrying, silver-plated, officially stamped, internationally certified member of The Cookbook Junkies. And that’s the truth. But today, at Colleen’s request, I am going to tell you about one special cookbook, in my case, it’s the Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook, 1980 edition. It was given to me and my husband for our very first married Christmas, back in 1986, by my mother-in-law.

My husband thumbed its pages more than I did that first year. He was working offshore so, on his time off, he was househusband, cooking meals and doing laundry while I was at work. I’d often get phone calls with random questions, like “What exactly is a Dutch oven and do we have one?” and I’d know he was planning dinner, hunched over that big book with its four-color photographs of Every Single Dish (no kidding) and making his shopping list. He made a pretty mean lasagna back in those days!

It was the only cookbook I took with me when we first moved overseas in 1987. In the days long before the internet and handy Google searches, it was my lifeline to classic recipes with tips on hostessing, how to fold fancy napkins or calculate food and drink amounts for party guests and, before too long, baby showers. With each move we have made over the years, and no matter how many cookbooks I’ve since collected, Old Faithful was the one cookbook that came in the suitcase. I didn’t dare put Good Housekeeping in the shipment! What if it went missing? And, of course, I’d need it before the shipment could arrive six weeks later anyway.

I have made recipes from its grease-stained leaves more times than I can count so it broke my heart when it started to fall apart. Its pages were spattered with dishes and desserts and gravies from family meals too numerous to count. Sticky baby fingerprints got ever increasingly bigger as our daughters grew into capable young women and became competent on their own in the kitchen. But far from outlasting its usefulness, and despite its own shattered spine, our Good Housekeeping still formed the backbone of the kitchen repertoire.

The great book was probably close to 20 years old when I first searched online for that same 1980 edition and bought a stranger’s less-used spare. I knew it was only a matter of time till the original would have to be retired.

And then it suddenly occurred to me that my daughters would need their own copies when they moved away from home! Otherwise, how would they make their daddy’s pancakes and waffles? Or our family’s apple pie? Not to mention the basic yellow cake that celebrated so many early birthdays! Boxed cake mix? Pfft. Couldn’t find those most places we’d lived, even if I'd wanted to. I found two more copies online and held them dear until it was time to write the inscriptions in the front covers and send them, and their girls, out into the world.

In due time, the original cookbook was indeed retired and is now up high in a safe cupboard, carefully inscribed newlywed Christmas message intact, its same edition stand-in doing the same remarkable job in my kitchen.

It’s still the only cookbook that comes in my suitcase when we move.

Homemade Spinach and Cheese Ravioli 

Whenever my daughters are home, we make ravioli with the fresh pasta recipe in our most dependable cookbook. If friends are around, everyone gets into the act. I took these photos a couple of years back and never have posted them or this recipe. But this seemed like the perfect time to share. Pasta making should be a group affair, dare I even say, celebration. Just try to ignore the cluttered counter, okay?

Ingredients
For the pasta dough:
2 1/4 to 2 1/2 cups or 280- 315g flour (plus extra for rolling out the pasta)
2 eggs
1 egg yolk
1 tablespoon olive oil or salad oil
1 teaspoon salt

For the ravioli filling:
3 oz or 85g grated mozzarella
3 oz or 85g cream cheese
1 3/4 oz or 50g freshly grated Parmesan
4 1/4 oz or 120g frozen spinach, thawed and drained
1 egg
Few grinds fresh black pepper

Method
In large bowl, combine 1 cup or 125g flour, 1/3 cup or 80ml water and remaining dough ingredients. With mixer at slow speed, beat for two minutes, occasionally scraping bowl with a rubber spatula.

Using a wooden spoon, stir in enough of remaining flour to make a soft dough.

Turn out onto floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes. Wrap in cling film and let stand 30 minutes.

While the dough rests, we can get on to the ravioli filling. It couldn’t be simpler. Mix all the ingredients together well in a mixing bowl. Set aside.

Once the dough has rested, cut off a small piece about the size of a tennis ball or perhaps just a little smaller. Wrap the dough again with the cling film.

Flour it well and use a rolling pin or a pasta roller to roll it out quite thinly to the size of your ravioli plaque.

Flour your ravioli plaque liberally and lay the sheet of pasta on top. Fill each hole with about a teaspoon of the filling.

Cut another piece of dough off of the big ball and, following the same instructions, roll it out to the size of your ravioli plaque.

Use a pastry brush to wet the pasta on the plaque between the spoons of filling.

Carefully, starting at one end, lay the second sheet of pasta on top of the filled one, sticking the two sheets together and pressing out the air as you go along.

Turn the ravioli plaque over and let the filled pasta drop out onto your countertop. If it sticks, just gently pry it off.

Trim the ravioli around the edges and cut them apart.

Set them aside on a plate lined with cling film and flour.

Continue the process until all the ravioli are rolled out, filled and cut apart. If you can get an assembly line going, it goes much faster. And it's much more fun!

Bribe the workers, if you must.

The ravioli can be stored in the refrigerator, covered with cling film or even frozen until you are ready to boil them.

To cook, boil water with salt and a little olive oil in a large pot, as you would for regular pasta and lower the ravioli in gently. Fresh pasta only takes a few minutes to cook.

See that? It's my biggest Calphalon pot.

Serve with the sauce of your choice.

It is my pleasure to introduce you to my fellow Cookbooks & Calphalon bloggers who have chosen recipes from or inspired by a cookbook that means a lot to them and are sharing their food stories.

Baking

• Beirut Tahini Swirls – Pastry Chef Online
• Classic Yellow Cake with Chocolate Frosting – Urban Bakes
• Cookie Dough Fudge Brownies – Sugar Dish Me
• Peanut Butter Squares - Kelly Bakes
• Plum and Pluot Galette - Fork Vs Spoon
• Raspberry Swirl Pound Cake – The Redhead Baker
• Simple Apple Crisp – Real: The Kitchen and Beyond

Cooking

• Homemade Spinach and Cheese Ravioli - Food Lust People Love
• Lemon Basil Chicken Thighs - Mind Over Batter
• Pecan Encrusted Chicken with a Creamy Dijon Sauce - Souffle Bombay
• Pesto Pasta and Peas with Grilled Shrimp - The Suburban Soapbox
• Roasted Salmon with Peanut Sauce - Tiny Farmhouse
• Spaghetti Parmesan - Food Ramblings
• Tomato Jam – Healthy. Delicious.

Drinks

• Oat-chata – Healthy Slow Cooking

Pin it!

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Easy Homemade Almond Marshmallows

Homemade marshmallows are actually quite easy to make but I have to warn you that they will spoil you for store-bought marshmallows forever, so wonderful are they. 

I have a few things on my bucket list that I want to make some day. Real puff pastry, ice cream, my friend Ishita’s mustard fish, marshmallows and Jamie Oliver’s wine-braised chicken with grapes, just to name a few. My friend Jenni Field, of Pastry Chef Online, dreamed up an ice cream challenge that would take care of two of those in one fell swoop. She wanted to take her Ice Cream Tuesdays to another level by adding marshmallow in some form and invited a group of us to join her. I could have taken the easy way out and used store bought but I figured it was time to step up and do the marshmallows myself.

Store bought marshmallows are light morsels best set aflame and eaten in front of a campfire, with sticky fingers and ash. These homemade ones are their distant ethereal cousin, the one that shows up at the wedding and makes the groom reconsider his commitment to the bride. The groomsmen fall all over themselves to seat her and the bridesmaids all want to be her. Elderly relatives all nudge each other and remark with awe, how she has grown and blossomed since they last saw her as a gangly, awkward preteen at the family reunion years ago! But you know what? She’s sweet and unassuming, not brash or overbearing, a genuinely nice person that everyone can’t help but like. May I introduce my almond marshmallows? I think you are going to like them.

Ingredients
4 1/2 oz or 125g whole raw almonds
2 tablespoons powdered gelatin
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon or 133ml cold water
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1 1/2 cups 0r 340g sugar
1 cup or 240ml corn syrup
1 1/2 tablespoons water
1 cup or 125g powdered sugar
1 cup or 135g cornstarch

Method
Toast your almonds in a small heavy skillet over a medium low flame. Toss or stir the nuts frequently to prevent scorching. The almonds are properly toasted when they are light brown and smell wonderfully nutty. Set aside to cool for a few minutes and then pulse in a food processor until you have small toasted almond crumbs.

Dissolve your gelatin in the cold water in the bowl of your stand mixer or another mixing bowl if using a hand held mixer.

(If your gelatin instructions say to dissolve in hot water, like mine do, heat three of tablespoons of the water and dissolve the gelatin in that. Allow to cool and then gradually add the cold water to your gelatin mixture, stirring continually so it doesn’t lump up on you, then put the gelatin mixture in your mixing bowl and continue as follows.)

My gelatin was made in New Zealand. I have no idea why it is brown but when dissolved, it turned clear. Whew.

Add the salt and almond extract to the mixing bowl with the water and gelatin. Stir well.

Meanwhile, mix your powdered sugar with your cornstarch and set aside.

Spray a half-sheet pan with non-stick spray. Line the pan with cling film, making sure it goes up the sides of the pan as well. Make sure you don’t have any bubbles under the cling film. You want the cling film stuck tight all over the pan.

Now spray the cling film with more non-stick spray and put it on thick. Use a sifter or strainer to cover the whole pan with a good layer of the powdered sugar/cornstarch mixture.

Sprinkle half of the ground almonds over the cornstarch/sugar mixture. Set the pan aside.

In a medium sized heavy bottomed pot, Stir your sugar and corn syrup with about a tablespoon and a half of water and bring to a low boil. Put the lid on and cook for two or three minutes more. Remove the lid and put your candy thermometer in the liquid. Heat till 244°F or 118°C.

When your syrup reaches temperature, pour it carefully down the inside of your mixing bowl.

If you are using a stand mixer, use the whisk attachment or beat on medium for a few minutes.

That's steam, people!

Once it’s all mixed together, turn the knob to high and beat until the mixture triples in volume. This is such fun to watch, as the clear liquid turns to fluffy white stuff.

Use non-stick spray to coat a rubber spatula and use it to scrape the beautiful sticky white stuff into your prepared pan.

Spread the marshmallow cream evenly around the pan, using more spray on your spatula whenever necessary.

Now spray the top of your marshmallow cream liberally.

Sprinkle on the rest of your toasted almond crumbs.  Now use your sifter or strainer again to cover the top of the marshmallow cream with a thick layer of the powdered sugar/ cornstarch mixture. No shiny marshmallow should peek out.  Put it on THICK! Don't be shy.

Set aside, uncovered, for several hours in a cool dry place to set.

When the marshmallow feels spongy yet firm, cut it into squares with a greased knife and coat all the sides in more powdered sugar/cornstarch to stop the pieces from sticking together.

A little tip: After you have cut a few slices and removed them to a big bowl with powdered sugar/cornstarch, you can cut the following slices and roll them over and over on the cling film, which will coat the long cut sides. Since you put a healthy layer of that stuff in the pan, right? Then you just have to coat the short sides as you cut the long pieces into squares.

Jenni was right. These marshmallows are like a whole different thing, compared to store-bought marshmallows. They are soooo good. And soft and fluffy and nutty and divine. She's made a wonderful video of her making marshmallows live that you should watch too.

Check back this Tuesday when I’ll be putting some of them in homemade no-churn (no ice cream machine needed!) coffee Amaretto ice cream, along with some candied almonds.

But don’t worry, this makes plenty enough marshmallows just to eat straight.

Enjoy!

If it just happens to be your helper's seventh birthday when you are making these, share a couple with him.

Homemade Vanilla Custard

So easy to make and much more delicious than the box, homemade vanilla custard is a great dessert itself, or heap it in a baked pie crust with bananas and top with whipped cream for something really special.

Last March I shared a story with you about a lovely man and his love of banana cream pie. But it occurred to me that the vanilla custard itself deserved its own post so folks can find it with a quick search. It's simple to make and you can use it in a trifle or as filling between layers in a special cake or even just eat it with a spoon.

Sure you can use custard powders but they have negligible nutritional value and some odd sounding ingredients, as well as sugar. This custard, on the other hand, has fresh egg yolks, so it would helpful if you are trying to boost the protein in someone's diet. But MOST importantly, it tastes delicious!

The following amounts make a little more than 1 3/4 cups or 425ml of custard. Just so you know.

Homemade Vanilla Custard

The eggs you use make all the difference to the color of the custard. For the photo at the top of this post, I made the custard with the wonderful, almost orange yolked eggs I could buy in Dubai. If your egg yolks aren't so spectacular, and color matters to you (It doesn't to me!) you can always add a little yellow food coloring.

Ingredients
1⁄2 cup or 110g sugar
1⁄3 cup or 42g all-purpose flour
1⁄4 teaspoon salt
2 1⁄4 cups or 530ml milk
4 egg yolks
1 tablespoon or 15g butter
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Method
In 2-quart saucepan (no heat!) mix sugar, flour and salt. Stir in milk until smooth.





Make sure you get ALL the lumps out before turning on the heat.

Over medium heat, cook mixture, stirring constantly, until mixture is thickened and begins to boil (about 10 minutes). Boil one minute. Remove immediately from heat and set aside.





See the tiny bubbles? It's gently boiling.

Separate your egg yolks from your whites, by gently transferring the yolk from one half of the shell to the other, putting the whites directly into a sealable plastic container for the refrigerator. (Later, you can make something lovely with these!) Put the yolks in a bowl with enough room to whisk.





Beat egg yolks quickly with a whisk, while drizzling in about a 1/4 cup of the hot milk mixture. Quick beating and slow drizzling are essential so that you don’t end up with cooked eggs.

Slowly pour egg mixture into the saucepan, stirring rapidly to prevent lumping.

I know it doesn't look like I was quickly stirring but that is just because I fake poured for the camera and then really poured and stirred like crazy after. 

Occasionally, scrape the saucepan with a rubber spatula. 

Over low heat, cook, stirring constantly, until very thick (do not boil) and mixture mounds when dropped from spoon.

Remove from heat; stir in butter and vanilla. 

Congratulations, you have made homemade vanilla custard. Once the butter has melted, pour the custard into a metal bowl. Cover its surface with plastic wrap to prevent skin forming. Refrigerate until set, about four hours. This delicious homemade custard can be used in a variety of desserts when fully set or simply eaten with a spoon when soft set, after it cools.

Enjoy! 

Habanero Pepper Sauce

Almost pure habanero peppers, this sauce has just a little vinegar and salt. The flavor and heat of the peppers really comes through.

First, a word of warning: Only make this on a day when you can open your windows and get full ventilation going in your house. Habanero peppers are some of the hottest on the planet and you will suffer lung damage if you breathe in these fumes. I am not even joking a little bit.

In our house, we eat this on everything. Well, everything savory. It is indispensable and irreplaceable and when we run out and Hock Choon (or Fiesta in Houston, or my little Géant in Dubai) doesn’t have fresh peppers to make more, we are sad beyond belief. When we lived in Singapore those three semesters, I would trek back after visits to KL with a cooler full of these beautiful peppers.

Used to be that I could get the orange ones which I think are somewhat hotter.  
I am happy to get red, if that's all they have. 

The customs guys would make me open my cooler and I looked like a dealer, I had so many. (Fortunately, Singaporeans understand an addiction to chilies and they would wave me through.) We just can’t live without them. If they don’t have habaneros in Cairo, we’re in trouble. (With the current stockpile of sauce, we'll be okay for a few months. After that, I'll let you know. You may need to send peppers.)

Ingredients
800g fresh habanero or scotch bonnet peppers
1/3 cup white vinegar
1 tablespoon sea salt

That’s it! We are talking almost pure-pepper sauce.

Method
Remove the stems and wash your peppers in a clean sink, full of water.

They float!

If some of the stems don’t come off clean, use a knife to remove the green. Likewise, if any of the peppers have a bad spot, cut it off. We are not really cooking this sauce so any bacteria is a bad thing.

Open your windows and ensure good cross ventilation in your house. Avoid inhaling in the direct vicinity of the peppers for the next step.

Grind the peppers in a food processor. They may not all fit at first, so grind what you can fit on your fastest speed and then add the balance.

Stop occasionally to scrape down the sides of the food processor with a rubber spatula. Remember not to breathe too deeply when you open it to scrape.

Meanwhile, wash and sterilize a few old jam jars with lids that close tightly without leaking. Which means, after washing well with dish soap, rinse them and then fill them with boiling water (putting a spoon in each to avoid breakage) and then drain. Avoid touching the inside of the lid or bottle now.

I always sterilize more than I think I'll need. It's hard to tell how much sauce you will get out of your peppers. 

Continue grinding the peppers for a few more minutes on high. Add in the salt and vinegar, scrape the processor vessel down again and put it back on high twirl for another few minutes.

You can see, I have scraped the sides down again. 

When your sauce is thick and pasty, put it in a pot on the stove and heat to boiling. If it is too thick, you can add a little water. You want to see it bubbling.

I added a little water.  About 1/4 cup.

We are not really cooking the sauce so this won’t take long. We just want to be hot enough to further sterilize the insides of your jars so the pepper sauce will last longer.

Meanwhile, set your jars out, with one teaspoon in each one. The spoon will keep the jar from breaking when you put the hot sauce in it. I am sure there is a good thermodynamic reason for this, but all I know is, it works. If you have a wide-mouth funnel, this will make transferring the boiling hot sauce to the jars much easier.

Once the sauce is boiling steadily, remove the pot from the heat and spoon or ladle it into the clean jars.

See that wide-mouthed funnel!  Great for this job.

Using a towel so you don’t burn your hands, tighten the lids as much as possible and turn the jars upside down. Once again, this helps the hot liquid sterilize the lid.

Every once in a while, when you pass the jars, try to tighten the lids a little more.

When the jars have cooled almost completely, turn the jars back upright. The round circle in the middle of the lid should be sucked in, just like when the original jam came from the manufacturer. If any of them don't seal tightly, store them in the refrigerator.

This will keep in a cool dark cupboard for months.  Once opened, keep the sauce in the refrigerator.

Even if you are a pepper eater, I suggest caution when adding this to food. It doesn’t take much!

Enjoy!