Iron Overdose

I have recently been watching a ton of Iron Chef America and The Next Iron Chef.  This has led me to two conclusions.  First, some of these people can really cook and second, I could could do some of that.  So this had led to some experimentation.  I have decided to begin trying to make things from scratch that I would have normally just buy.  I got inspiration from an episode where a chef was making Ravioli.  So I made some pasta dough and started rolling.  If I had a pasta machine this would not have taken that long, but since I don't skip ahead an hour and a half.

 I rolled the dough thin then cut out circles using a small bowl as template.  The dough circles have a diameter of about three inches.  In the end I got 33 circles, about twice what is in this picture.

 The filling was ricotta cheese and basil.  In retospect I wish I had added some spinach, but I didn't know that there was spinach in the house.

 I spooned some filling into the dough circles and by hand crimped them.  This took a while, but by the end i had developed a decent technique to get as much filing in as I could.

Here is a tray of finished ravioli, it is rather obvious that they are hand made but I don't really care.  I made a simple tomato based sauce, cooked the ravioli in water and presto.  I did not cook all the ravioli at once, and I cooked the last couple in the sauce itself.  All very tasty, but they really sucked all the moisture out of the sauce and it was a bit try.