Beet Ravioli

I've looked several times at beet ravioli pictures and recipes online, so when I found myself with a couple of beets and nothing in particular to do with them, I thought I'd try it out. I roughly followed Martha Stewart's Recipe and in hind sight I wish I had followed it more closely, because it turned out to be a complete failure.

Here's how it started: I had four beets, one of which was a Chioggia, which is shown below. (Btw I don't think I'll grow these next year...they aren't that fantastic looking and lose what color they have during cooking





I roasted all four beets, 350 F for a bit over an hour. I refrigerated them overnight, then the next day I peeled them and threw them into my mini food processor.


I then added two eggs to the food processor and blended it up.


This liquid went into a couple cups of flour (roughly half all purpose, half semolina)


I then rolled out the dough using my Kitchenaid and because the dough was so soft and kind of mushy, I decided to refrigerate that overnight. The consistancy of the dough should have been my first clue that I'd f***ed up, but instead I refrigerated the pasta sheets, which actually just made it crumbly and tough. Not helpful.

I mixed up a filling with herbed goat cheese, ricotta, and some shredded mozzerella and loaded it all up into my Kitchenaid ravioli maker. Here are most of the results:


Only a few raviolis ended up looking half decent.


However, because I hate to waste my own work and am somewhat clever, all was not lost. I froze the good looking raviolis for another night. With the demented raviolis and the leftover filling, I decided to put together a lasagna! I ran out to the garden and clipped some chard.


Then I layered that onto the ravioli mess.


Then the cheese filling.


And, somewhat to my horror, some Six Cheese Ragu. Don't get me wrong, I have a unreasonable LOVE for jars of store bought red sauce, but pouring it onto my homemade "ravioli", fresh cut chard, and a decadent goat cheese filling was decidedly sacreligious. BUT it was the only sauce I had on hand, so on it went.


I topped that with a bit more retarded ravioli and pasta scraps, another layer of sauce, and shredded mozzarella.





In the end, it actually was pretty delicious. The pasta texture was a little off, but was honestly quite tasty. I think I will probably even make the beet pasta again. Next time I think I'll follow the recipe a little closer, and will probably skip the ravioli making and go for another lasagna. It would be fun to make a lasagna with red pasta sheets and a white sauce, a reverse of the usual colors.

Stay tuned for a few days from now when I use the ravioli that weren't disasters.