As I wrote many times: we absolutely love having friends for dinner. It’s great to go to the food market and pick fresh vegetables, organic meat and the right selections of wines and ingredients for mouthwatering desserts. These are the special days, it’s nothing we do every day. Luckily we’ve learned to pull something out of the hat with a little less effort and costs because – especially when you have kids - you never know how many people there will be at the dinner table until last minute. One of our favorites for these occasions is homemade pasta. There’s millions of good ideas and recipes but I think everyone has a standard formula for feeding a bunch of people without spending a fortune but still raising a cheer. Ours is ravioli. The fillings do vary from ricotta and spinache to cheese, onions and bacon or walnuts, cheese and basil…whatever there is in the fridge. Until we found our best pasta dough it took a couple of attempts. The most difficult thing was to keep the pastry elastic and dry because otherwise it will either stick to your fingers or end up perforated, both is annoying. Our recipe with a guarantee for success (a friend who is an Italian chef gave away his secret) is the following:
ravioli
I was very surprised that there were any left at all after I started to pinch one or two pea pods everyday but fresh from the garden and uncooked they’re extremely good, almost sweet, I couldn’t resist. Luckily in the end there were some left the other day and we brought the harvest home. You should really eat them raw in a salad or blanched for less then 10 minutes in a pasta sauce because that’s when you really taste the difference. We went for the pasta, it was very sunny and we enoyed the mixture of soft peas and crispy bacon. Apart from peeling the little peas out of their pod homes (which took me about 15 minutes) this is real fast food but so much better and healthier than the stuff you can buy.
