A wonderful Sunday lunch recipe

Pasta is an ancient Italian tradition. There are many types, shapes and sizes. Traditionally, pasta is made by our grandmas on Sunday mornings so that we can enjoy lunch with all the family. I have tried myself, and hereafter is the recipe I used.

Ingredients for the dough:

• 4 big eggs (around 70 gr each )
• 400 gr of flour
• 1 tablespoon of salt

Ingredients for the filling:

• 200 gr of fresh spinach
• 200 gr Ricotta
• Salt
• Pepper

Process:

Regarding the process, I will first explain to you the process for making the dough and then for preparing the filling. Lastly we will see how to cook them.

Dough:

1. To prepare the dough, start by putting flour and salt in a bowl. Mix them together.
2. At the centre of the bowl, make a hole in the flour. Add the eggs and start kneading the eggs with the flour around. Keep kneading until the dough reaches a non-sticky consistency. Let it sit for half an hour at room temperature. Image 1

Filling:

1. Wash the spinach and cook it in boiling water for 10 minutes. Afterwards, remove the water and put the spinach in a bowl.
2. Add the ricotta, salt and pepper, and stir until the mixture reaches a creamy consistency.

Preparing Pasta

1. After half an hour has passed, you can start preparing the pasta. If you have a pasta maker, you can use it to make the pasta layer thin. Otherwise, just use a wooden roller, as I did. You will need to cut a piece of dough and roll it on a hard surface, preferable a wooden table. However, any other flat surface is fine too. Start by putting some flour on the surface (don’t forget this part otherwise, your dough will be stuck to the surface), roll the piece of dough into a thin layer, between 2-4 mm.
2. Take a teaspoon of filling and put it onto the thin layer of dough. Place the next teaspoon approximately 3 cm apart from it. Repeat this step until the entire area is covered in little heaps. In the end, each of the little heaps should have 2 cm of clearance all around it (to be able to close the ravioli in the next step). Image 2
3. Roll out another thin layer of dough and position it on the first layer which by now contains the filling. You will have two layers of dough with the filling in between. Now you have to cut around the filling so that you can form the traditional Ravioli squared shape. You will obtain many different squares. To close the edges of the single Ravioli, you can use a fork to press on their edges. This will prevent the filling from running out when the ravioli are cooking. Image 3 and 4
4. Continue with this process until you finish the dough. Image 5
5. When you finished all the dough, you can start cooking the Ravioli in boiling water. Let them boil for 10 min. You can serve them with tomato sauce, pesto or just a tablespoon of olive oil and parmesan on top. Image 6

Enjoy your meal!

Variants:

• You can choose various ingredients for the filling such as cooked kale and rice, with minced meat and carrots.

Tips:

• The proportion between eggs and flour is 1 to 100.

Gallery

• Image 1 Kneading the dough

• Image 2 Put the filling onto the dough

• Image 3 Cutting the Ravioli with knife

• Image 4 Closing the Ravioli with a fork

• Image 5 Ready to be boiled Ravioli

• Image 6 Ravioli with oil and tomato sauce