Stuffed shells for these long winter nights

While this photo may be a disaster
I could not resist gushing over this completely delicious dish.

I don't know about you, but in the winter, I crave pasta dishes with gooey cheese and comforting red sauce all the time. And, while I love lasagna, it can be a bit time consuming. Enter: stuffed shells to save the day! (Thanks, Giada!)

These shells are stuffed with a ricotta-parmesan-basil mixture and covered with good marinara and mozzarella cheese. Now, I really enjoyed the simplicity of this dish, but you could add pretty much anything you wanted to the filling: mushrooms, other herbs, shredded up carrots, peppers... your imagination could run wild! Alternatively, make these like they are and add a roasted veggie on the side, like asparagus with some lemon zest and juice. Whatever you do, you cannot go wrong.

And, they are so easy to make!

To start: boil your jumbo pasta shells in salted water for 4-5 minutes. They will be pretty hard when they are done, but they will keep on baking in the oven. In the meantime, whip up your ricotta mix: ricotta, parmesan, egg yolks, basil, salt, and pepper. Like I said, you could add just about anything to this mix, but feel free to keep it 'pure'. Now, stuff the shells with about 2 tablespoons of the mixture.
And, nestle them side by side in a baking dish, over a layer of sauce.
Now, if you are good at following directions, you will next cover the shells with sauce, and then sprinkle mozzarella over them. So it should look like this at the end:
If you are bad at following directions, and you put the mozzarella on first, and then the pasta sauce, you will have to do some 'rearranging'.
Pretty? No. But, the flavors were still dynamite.

Now, bake that off for 25-30 minutes, until it is bubbly and golden (which would be easier to accomplish by following directions...).
Top with a handful of basil.
Once it has cooled a bit...
Buon Appetito!

Stuffed Shells (adapted* from Giada)
Ingredients:
1/2 box (6 oz) jumbo pasta shells
1 24 oz jar of good marinara
1 15 oz container of whole milk ricotta
2/3 cup grated Parmesan
2 egg yolks
1/4 cup fresh chopped basil
3/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella

Directions:
Lightly oil a 9x9 basking dish and set aside. Preheat oven to 350.

Partially cook the pasta shells in a large pot of boiling, salted water until slightly tender, but still quite firm, about 4-5 minutes. Drain pasta shells well and allow to cool.

In a medium bowl, stir together ricotta, Parmesan, egg yolks, basil, salt, and pepper.

Spoon 3/4 cup (or whatever it takes) of the sauce over the bottom of the baking dish. Fill the cooked shells with about 2 Tablespoons of mixture per shell (just enough until the shells are full). Arrange the shells in the baking dish. Spoon the remaining sauce over the shells, then sprinkle with mozzarella.

Bake in the lower third of your oven until the filling is heated through and the top is golden brown, about 25-30 minutes.

Let rest for a little bit before serving.

*I halved Giada's recipe, and I didn't make the arrabiata sauce

The Bicoastal Chefs present... Homemade Pumpkin Ravioli

Looking for a good challenge during our reunion, the Bicoastal Chefs decided to combine their skills and tackle homemade pasta.
And if ever there was a dish requiring all four hands, making pasta is it. It turns out kneading and rolling pasta dough is way tougher than you think. But, side by side, the Bicoastal Chefs are unstoppable.

We settled on making a pumpkin ravioli topped with a balsamic-sage brown butter. We started cooking around 7:30, figuring we would be done by 8:30. We did not eat until 11. But it did not matter at all: the fresh made pasta was absolutely delicious. Store bought pasta doesn't even compare. So, yes, fresh made pasta requires a lot of work, but it is well worth it.

So, here's how we made. We decided to use Jamie Oliver's recipe from 'Cook with Jamie', because there were step by step directions and pictures (always a bonus when taking on an epic dish).

The dough itself is very simple: flour and eggs. That's it. So, first pour your flour onto your counter.
Make a well in the middle of the flour.
Then, crack 6 eggs into that well.
Next, whisk up the eggs.
Now, for one of the first challenges. You are, slowly but surely, going to mix the flour into the eggs. You can't mix all the flour in at once; you just mix the edges in bit by bit.
The dough is incredibly sticky, but it eventually comes together.
Once you have a ball of dough, you have to knead that dough until it is smooth and silky. Warning: this takes a long time and is incredibly difficult. It will make you wish you lifted weights. We took turns for about 20 minutes, stretching, punching (not recommended), rolling, and folding. Once it is silky-smooth, pop it into the frig for 30 minutes to rest.
After 30 minutes, it is time to roll it out. This also takes a surprising amount of effort. Since we were making ravioli, we rolled out two large sheets of pasta. You know if it thin enough when you can see through it (when it has that 'window-pane' effect).
But, what about the filling, you ask? We settled on pumpkin.
So, cut the pumpkin in half, seed it, and brush it with olive oil.

Roast the pumpkin for an hour.
Once the pumpkin is done, scoop out the flesh into a cheese or terry cloth.
Then squeeze all the liquid out. You will be amazed at how much comes out.
For the filling, you are supposed to add amaretti cookies, which we could not find, so we substituted some almonds and brown sugar. It came out just fine.
For the rest of the filling, add in shallots, nutmeg, salt, pepper, the pumpkin, egg, ricotta, and parmesan.
And, voila, absolutely gorgeous pumpkin filling.
Now, to make the ravioli, place about 1 tablespoon of filling 3 inches apart on the sheets. Note that if we had to do this again, we would place the filling a little closer together (maybe every 2 inches?) to increase the filling to pasta ratio...
Brush water around the filling.
And place the other sheet on top. Press around the filling, to seal the ravioli.
In order to avoid air bubbles, it's better to start sealing the pasta from the middle - out. We learned the hard way: Time to cut it up!
And, at long last, the ravioli is ready to be cooked.
Once your water is boiling, plop the ravioli in.
And, at the same time, get your brown butter going.
Once the butter is brown, you add in the sage, take it off the heat, and stir in some balsamic.
When that is done, toss it with your drained ravioli. Be sure to do this in the pan your cooked the ravioli or brown butter in because the heat will help the ravioli absorb the sauce. We tried it in the saute pan first, but it was too small, so we threw everything in the pot we boiled the ravioli in.
Once the ravioli are coated, plate it up.
Grate some parmesan over it. And there you have it, Bicoastal-Chefs-made ravioli.
Buon Appetito!

Fresh Egg Pasta Dough (from Cooking with Jamie)
serves 4

5 cups (1 lb 6 oz) tipo OO or pasta flour (we just used all-purpose flour)
6 large free-range or organic eggs or 12 yolks (we used 6 eggs)

Place the flour on a board or in a bowl. Make a well in the center and crack the eggs into it. Beat the eggs with a fork until smooth. Using the tips of your fingers, mix the eggs with the flour, incorporating a little at a time, until everything is combined. Knead the pieces of dough together- with a bit of work and some love and attention they'll all bind together to give you one big, smooth lump of dough!

You can also make your dough in a food processor if you've got one. Just bung everything in, whiz until the flour looks like breadcrumbs, then tip the mixture on to your work surface and bring the dough together into one lump, using your hands.

Once you've made your dough you need to knead and work it with your hands to develop the gluten in the flour, otherwise your pasta will be flabby and soft when you cook it, instead of springy and al dente.

There's no secret to kneading. You just have to bash the dough about a bit with your hands, squashing it into the table, reshaping it, pulling it, stretching it, squashing it again. It's quite hard work, and after a few minutes it's easy to see why the average Italian grandmother has arms like Frank Bruno! You'll know when to stop- it's when your pasta starts to feel smooth and silk instead of rough and floury. Then all you need to do it wrap it in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge to rest for at least half an hour before you use it. Make sure the plastic wrap covers it well or it will dry out and go crust around the edges (this will give you crust lumps through your pasta when you roll it out, and nobody likes crusty lumps!)

How to roll your pasta:
First of all, if you haven't got a pasta machine it's not the end of the world! All the mammas I met while traveling round Italy rolled pasta with their trusty rolling pins and they wouldn't even consider having a pasta machine in the house! When it comes to rolling, the main problem you'll have is getting the pasta thin enough to work with. It's quite difficult to get a big lump of dough rolled out into one piece, and you need a very long rolling pin to do the job properly. The way around this is to roll lots of small pieces of pasta rather than a few big ones.

Dust your work surface with some flour, take a lump of pasta dough the size of a large orange and press it with your fingertips.

Then... roll.

Whether you're rolling by hand or by machine you'll need to know when to stop. If you're making a pasta like tagliatelli, lasagne, or stracchi, you'll need to roll the pasta down to between the thickness of a beer may and a playing card; if you're making a stuffed pasta like ravioli or tortellini, you'll need to roll it down slightly thinner or to the point where you can clearly see your hand or lines of newspaper print through it.

Once you've rolled your pasta the way you want it, you need to shape or cut it right away. Pasta dried much quicker than you think, so whatever recipe you're doing, don't leave it more than a minute or two before cutting and shaping it. You can lay over it a damp clean tea towel which will stop it from drying.

Pumpkin Ravioli with Sage Brown Butter (adapted from a marthastewart.com recipe)

1 3-pound sugar pumpkin or butternut squash
4 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons light-brown sugar
1 large egg
1/4 cup Locatelli cheese*
3 large or 6 small amaretti cookies, curshed**
2 tablespoons fresh ricotta cheese
1 tsp shallots, chopped
Pinch of nutmeg
Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper
Fresh pasta
1 tablespoon semolina flour***
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 tablespoon freshly chopped sage
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

Directions
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. On a work surface, cut pumpkin in half lengthwise. Scoop out seeds (save to roast!). Transfer to a parchment-lined baking sheet. Drizzle olive oil evenly over insides of pumpkin halves; rub 1/2 tsp brown sugar into each. Roast, cut-side down, until pumpkin is easily pierced with a knife, about 1 hour. Let cool.

When cool enough to handle, scoop out flesh with a spoon. You'll need 1 1/2 cups of puree. Transfer flesh to a clean kitchen towel or cheesecloth; wring excess liquid into a bowl. Place flesh in the bowl of a food processor, along with eggs, Locatelli, amaretti, ricotta, shallot, and nutmeg. Process until smooth. Season with salt and pepper.

Lay 1 pasta sheet on work surface. Place 1 tablespoon filling every 3 inches. Brush water around filling. Place another sheet on top, pressing around filling to seal.**** Using a fluted pastry wheel (knife, or pizza cutter), cut each ravioli into a 3-by-3 inch square. Repeat with remaining pasta sheets and filling. Transfer ravioli to a parchment-lined baking sheet sprinkle with semolina; freeze for at least 30 minutes.*****

Bring a large pot of water to boil; season with salt. Add ravioli. Cook until it just floats, 3 to 4 minutes.

In a large saute pan, melt butter over high heat. Add sage; cook until butter begin to brown and sizzle, about 1 minute. Remove pan from heat; whisk in balsamic. Using a slotted spoon, transfer ravioli to pan, tossing to combine. Serve immediately with Parmesan cheese.

*We used Parmesan
**Although amaretti cookies may seem strange to us, they are a traditional ingredient. We substituted almonds and 2 tbs of brown sugar
***We used all-purpose
****Start pressing from the middle and working outwards, to try and avoid air bubbles. If you do have air bubbles, just work them out.
*****We skipped this step because we let the dough rest in the frig.

Lasagna and Lessons Learned

Maybe the fact that the Vegetarian Lasagna recipe in Joy of Cooking calls for 6 pounds of eggplant and zucchini would phase some cooks. Not me. I didn't even bat an eye when I wrote 'eggplant (3 pounds) and zucchini (3 pounds)' on my grocery list. "Why?", you ask. Because I am devoted recipe-follower.

There are several reasons for this. First, I am my mother's daughter.

The second reason, and one I have only realized recently, has to do with this stage in my culinary life. Right now, I am learning how to cook. I am learning about techniques (Oh my, I love to chiffonade). I am learning about ingredients (What, you can make your own creme fraiche?). And I am learning about flavor combinations (Wait, peaches and tomatoes?). At the end of the day, I don't think I can become a better cook without understanding these basics of cooking. Before getting crazy and grating nutmeg all over everything, I should know why you use nutmeg, what recipes traditionally call for it, and what other ingredients it compliments. And one terrific way to learn is by following recipes from other cooks who have the experience and knowledge that I don't yet have.

Third, I like keeping track of what works and doesn't work, so one day I can have 'classic recipes'. You know, those tried and true recipes that you just own. If you follow a recipe once and you don't like it, you can keep track of what you didn't like and adjust it the next go round. I find when I just wing it, whether it works out well or horribly, it is incredibly difficult to repeat.

So, back to the lasagna that calls for 6 pounds of veggies... Well 6 1/2 pounds if you count the extra mushrooms I threw in. Apparently, 6 1/2 pounds of veggies may be a tad too much. In fact, there were so many veggies in this lasagna, I couldn't even fit in the last layer of pasta. But, this is good to know, next time I make veggie lasagna maybe I will shoot for 3-4 pounds of veggies. Consider my Joy of Cooking so annotated. See, isn't following recipes fun?!

Here's the making of it. I mostly followed the Joy of Cooking recipe, although I did take advice from a friend on the layering part. (She suggests that having veggies on the bottom provides more stability to the whole lasagna.)

First for the veggies. Did I mention there were 6 1/2 pounds of them?
I chopped them up.


Then it was time to roast them. I started to pile them onto my baking sheets. Only to quickly realize that if I wanted them to be in a single layer (which is a must for roasting), two sheets was definitely not enough.
Look at all that was left over.
So, in order to follow the recipe, I had to do two rounds of roasting,
and sauteed the mushrooms.
This ended up tacking on quite a bit of time. So lesson learned: when living somewhere without two ovens, only include the amount of veggies that will fit on two baking sheets. My guess is around 3-4 pounds.

While the veggies threatened to take everything over, I made the ricotta mixture. Have you met my cheese grater? This is the OXO Good Grips cheese grater. This is the best cheese grater ever. Because, you see that little box on the bottom? You perch your grater on top of that box, and it measures and catches your cheese as you grate it. Once you are done, remove the box, and you can either use the grated cheese, or pop the lid on the box and put it in the frig. Seriously, I love this tool.
For the ricotta mixture: ricotta, eggs, parmesan, salt, pepper, and nutmeg(!). See, if you read up on nutmeg, you learn that it loves things like ricotta mixtures.

Once I boiled my pasta, I got my assembly line ready.
Veggies, sauce, mozzarella, noodles, ricotta, repeat.

So, veggies.
Sauce. I always have the problem of under-saucing, and even this time, I used almost twice as much as Joy of Cooking called for and it still wasn't quite enough.
Mozza... oh wait, I misread the directions and did ricotta. Not dire, by any means, but it did get a little pink.
Noodles,
The mozzarella that was supposed to be ricotta.
And I repeated it until I got to what was supposed to be the final pasta layer. Much to my recipe-following chagrin, there was absolutely no room left for those last three noodles.
6 1/2 pounds of veggies will apparently do that to you. Then again, I did use a layering technique not in the Joy of Cooking, so perhaps I oughtn't blame the recipe.
So, I finished it off with some cheese, prayed that I wouldn't drop it, and popped/lugged it in the oven. 30 minutes covered with foil, 20 minutes without the foil. And, voila:
Come on, now. Look at that goodness.
Some lasagna, some salad (arugula with pear and gorgonzola), and an Italian red-blend: who wouldn't want this for dinner?
Garnished with some fresh basil, my 6-1/2-pounds-of-vegetables-lasagna was fantastic.
The many lessons learned:
-6 1/2 pounds of veggies is too much for a 13x9x2 pan. Include only as many vegetables as can be roasted on 2 baking sheets (about 3-4 pounds)
-if you do use 6 1/2 pounds of vegetables and you want all the layers of pasta in, try with the pasta on the bottom
-even if you can't include that last layer of pasta, this lasagna is delicious
-assembly lines for lasagna are brilliant
-you don't have to feel bound to eggplant and zucchini, you could use almost any vegetable that you wanted as long as it roasts well: peppers, summer squash, onions...
-if you want a sauce-y lasagna, don't follow normal directions; they call for very little sauce. For this lasagna, two 24-oz jars of marinara would have been ideal. Maybe a little less if you are doing fewer veggies
-when you cover your lasagna with tin foil, it helps to spray one side with Pam. This way, the melted cheese won't stick to the foil.

Roasted Vegetable Lasagna (adapted from Joy of Cooking)
Ingredients:
Eggplants (about 3 pounds), cut into 1/2 inch slices (I used Chinese eggplants, but if you use a globe eggplant, quarter it length-wise) (I would go with 1 1/2 pounds)
6 medium zucchini (about 3 pounds), cut in 1/2 inch slices (again, I would go with 1 1/2 pounds)
8 oz cremini mushrooms, sliced
4 cups shredded mozzarella
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 24 oz jars of marinara
15 oz ricotta
2 eggs
1/2 cup olive oil
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp freshly grated black pepper
1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg (or to taste)
1 pounds dry lasagna

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 450. Grease a 13x9 pan. Toss the vegetables with 1/2 cup olive oil, 1 tsp salt, and 1/2 tsp black pepper. Divide the vegetables between several baking sheets, spreading them in a single layer. Roast for 15 minutes. Toss the vegetables and continue to roast until well browned and soft, 15-2o minutes more. Transfer the vegetables to a large bowl.

Reduce the oven temperature to 375. Cook pasta in a large pot of salted, boiling water, stirring occasionally for 6-7 minutes, until barely tender. Drain the past and run cold water over it. Separate and blot it dry.

In a medium bowl, stir together the ricotta, eggs, 1/2 cup grated Parmesan, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp black pepper, and nutmeg.

Get all your lasagna components in a row. Spread a thin layer of sauce over the bottom of the prepared pan. Cover with a layer of pasta, slightly overlapping. Spread with one-third of the ricotta mixture. Sprinkle one-quarter of the mozzarella and grated Parmesan over the ricotta. Spoon one-third of the roasted vegetables on top and then add 1/2 cup of sauce (I added almost 1 cup). Add another layer of pasta and continue layering the lasagna until you have 4 layers of pasta and 3 layers of filling. Spread the remaining sauce on top and sprinkle with the remaining mozzarella and Parmesan. [see below for alternative layering technique]. Dot with butter (optional).

Spray aluminum foil with Pam , cover the pan with the foil (Pam side down), and bake for 30 minutes. Uncover and continue to bake until golden and bubbly, 15-20 minutes. Let stand 15 minutes before serving. Garnish with basil or parsley.

Alternative layering technique: 1/3 of the veggies, about 1 cup of sauce, 1/4 of the mozzarella and Parmesan, pasta, 1/3 of the ricotta, 1/3 of the veggies, about 1 cup of sauce, 1/4 mozzarella and Parmesan, pasta, 1/3 of the ricotta, 1/3 of the veggies, about 1 cup of sauce, 1/4 of the mozzarella and Parmesan, pasta, sauce, 1/4 of the mozzarella and Parmesan. (Note: I did not get this last layer of pasta in).