Sometimes you just don’t know what to cook. My hot tip is: take a look in your deep-freezer.
Long-forgotten things will come to light again and there will be many a left-over to conjure up a new, delicious dish.

Yesterday, I found a deep-frozen container (can!) with a forcemeat of chicken liver and mushrooms which remained from a dinner party. I couldn’t remenber how I had spiced it and when it was defrosted it had a peppery taste of chicken liver, port, fried onions and ceps – the right stuff to make ravioli!

The pasta dough was soon kneaded: 300 g of Italian durum wheat flour, 3 small eggs, a generous pinch of salt, 2 tbsp. native olive oil and cold water ( I took 4 – 6 tbsp.) to prepare a firm dough in the food processor within 10 minutes. This quantity of dough would have been enough for 6 persons. Wrapped in a foil, the dough should rest for about 30 minutes in the fridge.

Then the dough is rolled into thin layers using a pasta machine. This is not difficult if you use a lot of flour to prevent the dough from sticking to the work surface. After giving the dough twice the fourth degree on the machine I found the layers thin enough – you could see through them but they were still easy to handle.

With a ring cutter as you can buy on every market in Italy (at the houseware mongers whose market stalls I could snuffle and rifle through for days on end) the dough layers are cut into disks with a diameter of approx. 8 cm. Needless to say, you can also use a jar for cutting the disks, but you might miss the Italian market feeling …

Then the dough disks are coated with egg-white along the edges, a blob of chicken forcemeat is placed in the center, the disks are folded up and thoroughly sealed at the edges – this will hold tight. I couldn´t think of any easier or faster way to fill ravioli.
On top of this, they look great. Lying on flour and covered so that they will not dry the ravioli wait for the salt water to boil.

There should be enough salt in the water (15 g of salt in one liter, at least). After 4 or 5 min. the ravioli are done al dente.

While the ravioli are boiling you can heat some butter or oil and fry some chopped sage leaves in it. You may also want to add some fine chili cubes. Or perhaps parsley instead of sage?

Anyway, before serving the briefly drained ravioli are shortly cooked in a pan with the herb and oil mixture and are finally sprinkled with ground black pepper and, if you like, with some ground cheese.
Canned ravioli can be a real treat – provided you make them yourself.

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