Vegan Mofo! Ravioli with tofu and squash filling and roasted garlic cream sauce
Dinner, Monday October 19.
This was a potential disaster in the making- attempting fresh ravioli on a weeknight. I’ve made ravioli a few times before and it was always a hugely time consuming and annoying process since I didn’t have a pasta machine and had to roll out the dough by hand. For some reason I really dislike rolling dough out and avoid it at all costs. Seriously. Whenever I make pies, I just kind of press the pie dough into the pan, and it turns out fine. When I made mini seitan pot pies for last year’s Christmas dinner, I had a couple of willing sous chefs to take care of that end of things. I’ve made the pot pies a few other times and always dreaded the dough part of it.
Anyway, I decided tonight that ravioli would be the perfect way to use up the half block of tofu lefto over from last night’s dinner, some of the leftover roasted squash, and the remaining roasted garlic. And it would go well with the lettuce and olive bread that also needed to be used up soon. I was afraid it would be a timeconsuming mess, but thanks to the pasta machine it all came together quickly and easily.
First, the filling. 1/2 block of firm tofu, a handful of roasted acorn squash, nutritional yeast, tamari, tahini, oregano, garlic, a little bit of chopped tomato, salt and pepper. Very similar to the manicotti filling I made the other day.
Now on to the ravioli making! It was SO much easier to get nice sheets of pasta to put into the ravioli mold with the pasta machine! The ravioli mold itself is really easy to use, and I definitely recommend getting one if you want to make something that looks impressive but is actually easy. You just put one sheet of pasta down on the mold (spray or brush the mold with oil first- you don’t want your raviolis to stick!), and make little indentations for the filling. Put a tiny bit of filling into each indentation. Don’t put too much or it will make an oozy mess when you try to cut them apart (learned that one the hard way!). Put another pasta sheet over top and roll it with the little rolling pin. The mold has wavy ridges that indent the pasta sheets and break it apart. For some reason the outer ridges do a much better job of cutting the pasta than the inner ones, so I usually end up pressing down those parts with my finger or even just using scissors to cut them apart. Once you’ve got all your indentations, start removing the raviolis one by one. If they don’t separate, just cut them apart with scissors. Put them on a plate so they don’t stick together, and then boil them in salted water for just a minute. When they are ready they will float to the top of the water.
I made a quick garlic cream sauce for mine (roasted garlic, earth balance, vermouth, almond meal, flour, plain soymilk, salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, hot pepper relish) but these are also great with a marinara sauce.
Looks stunning! Those ravioli molds are on my list.
