Taste & Create: Goat Cheese Ravioli with Roasted Peppers

What a completely exhausting weekend.  Fun, but butt whoopin’ exhausting.  It’s all my fault.  I should know by now when the alarms go off several days in a row (in my head) that I need to NOT do what I’ve planned to do.  Especially with Thanksgiving looming in the near distance.  Jeez.

Friday, I was going to have a leisurely time in the kitchen preparing a dish as a part of Taste & Create, a blogging event hosted by Nicole at For the Love of Food.  But I got such a late start, I had to put that fun off until Sunday.  So much for dinner on Friday.  *sigh* I was able to prepare the layers of a cake I was going to take to a dinner party on Saturday.  Then Saturday, I would take care of the latest Daring Baker Challenge.  Finally, I’d frost the cake and be off to the dinner party.  At the crack o’ dawn on Sunday, I was going to get up and have some fun with cyber baking buddies on Yahoo Messenger while we cooked.  Uh…..Nope.  Software, Beta versions, PC’s vs. Macs…You name it and it all conspired to keep us apart.  So very sad since I was really looking forward to seeing just how gunked up my keyboard would get cooking and IMing.

But  few weeks ago, I discovered ustream.tv, so I figured at least I could broadcast myself while I was cooking and maybe a few buddies could text while they were laughing their butts off over my "show."  More on that some other time.  Suffice it to say it was a lot of fun, but totally the reason I’m tired.  I made some cinnamon rolls, and finally, the feature of this post: Goat Cheese Ravioli with Bell Peppers & Brown Butter, the dish I was supposed to have for dinner Friday.  I was so out of time considering I had to make it, eat it and post about it by the end of today!  Nothing like being seriously late.  It’s not the first time, however.

Katie of Other People’s Food was matched with me for the Taste & Create event I mentioned above.  If I remember correctly, Katie won the very first blogging event I entered: Hay, Hay, It’s Donna Day where we all had to make chocolate mousse.  That was back in April of this year.  Goodness, how time flies!

So for Taste & Create, Katie and I had to peruse each other’s archives, choose a dish, cook it, and create a post about it.  All in all, a pretty great idea.  I chose the Ravioli linked above from her archives because I love the combination of the flavors.  Katie’s homemade ravioli are so cute perched atop the colorful peppers with just the perfect sprinkle of fresh parmesan. Since I’d never made my own pasta, I thought, "Sure!"  Uh-huh.  Right.  A couple of funny things happened on the way to the completion…

Outside of talking to those people who tuned into my ustream.tv broadcast, and dealing with cinnamon rolls, rolling pasta was, erm…challenging.  I don’t have an attachment…SANTA!!!!!!!! so couldn’t quite get it thin enough.  How did people do this without all the nifty gadgets that now exist?

I don’t want to hear anyone say anything about what this reminds them of.  Like my husbink just did.  This is a FOOD blog.

The consensus from my huzbink and middle son after tasting the completed dish was that the ravioli needed to be cooked longer. (Think chewy…) And last but not least, while I was yammering away on ustream.tv, I guess I picked up my salt container and confused it with the measured amount of salt I’d set aside for the pasta.  Thankfully, it wasn’t that much more, but it did cause my pasta to be more salty than we like. *cough — water!*

Fortunately, I also made a few of the ravioli with won ton wrappers which is what the original recipe called for.  These turned out very nicely flavorwise. *whew*  And they were definitely easier to make since I lacked the pasta experience.

The roasted pepper tomato sauce was excellent.  It would be fabulous on regular pasta.  The richness of the peppers combined with the cheese and fresh herbs (rosemary, chives, oregano, sage, thyme) in the ravioli is quite pleasant.  The bit of chopped nicoise olives and toasted pinones were a very nice touch as well.  (I will confess I added a roasted Green Chili to the pepper mixture.  I couldn’t resist, as I love the flavor and heat. And I had one sitting in my veggie bowl just waiting to be used…)  Here’s Katie’s recipe if you missed it above.

The moral to this story is, don’t bite off more than you can chew!  Not a new lesson, is it?  Still, I’m learning that with time and planning, there are excellent recipes to be tried from other’s blogs simply because they’ve tried it themselves and can share their learning.  Another no brainer, Kelly.  D.U.H. 

I think there’s a bathtub and some bubbles upstairs with my name on it.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to get out of bed tomorrow.  And then the Thanksgiving prep begins….Oh. My. Goodness.

Thanks, Katie, for the recipe!  I will be using the pepper & tomato combo as well as the cheese & herb mix for bruschetta in the near future.  It will be totally scrumptious, don’t you think?

And thanks, Nicole, for a fun event.  Expect to see me again!