Pasta has got to be one of the best things in the world. I love pasta. I also love making pasta. When I started getting some serious pocket money from my parents, the very first thing that I bought with it was a pasta machine. I was 12. Not even joking. LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT.

This recipe is something new that I was just making up as I went along and I think it turned out pretty well. Sorry to my parents though who had to deal with me getting a little stressed when I forgot to flour the bench, but I think they forgave me because they got a good meal out of it :D

(Serves 2 people and one very hungry father)

Ingredients

200g Semolina

200g Plain Flour

4 Eggs

1 Brown Onion (diced, so so diced)

2 cloves of garlic (chop it up all small like)

1 tsp ground sage

400g Pumpkin (chopped into little itty bitty pieces)

1 Leek (cut off the green bit and chuck it in the bin, chop up the white stuff and use it)

75g Feta

2 tbsp Butter

Big Handful of Fresh Sage Leaves

Method

1. Let’s get our pasta dough going. Mix your flour and semolina together. You can do it in a bowl if you like, but I’m HARDCORE and I do it straight onto the bench. Now make a little well/hole/dint in your mix and crack in your first egg. Pretty important that you only do the eggs one at a time. You incorporate the egg slowly into the dry ingredients by mixing with a fork. Do this with each egg.

2. Now get your hands into it. Mix it all up and knead it until it looks like a pretty ball of dough. If it feels a bit dry, you can add some water. Alternatively, if it’s a bit too wet, add some flour. Basically, you want it to feel soft, but not sticky. Wrap it up in some cling film and leave in the fridge for about an hour.

3. While the dough is resting and getting yummy, let’s get going on our filling! I sorta made this up based on what I had around the house, so you can definitely afford to use different ingredients or quantities if you do so desire.

4. Yep Step 3 was just me chatting. Ok, let’s start by getting a frypan on low-medium heat with a nice glug of oil. Add your onion, garlic and leek and cook for about 15 minutes (niiiiiice and slowly now) until soft but not brown. This is called a sofrito! (How fancy of me).

5. Once softened, add the ground sage and the pumpkin. Let this cook up until soft, keep stirring it lots and lots.

6. Awesome, it’s all cooked (see how I’m giving you the thumbs up? It’s because it’s cooked. Nice work you). Now we want to make it smooth. I used a hand held electric blender type device and it worked, if you don’t have one, you might need to transfer it to a blender, or otherwise just try and mash it up with your spoon if you don’t mind it being a bit lumpy.

7. Now we add the crumbled feta, stir it through. Now we have nice little chunks of feta in our pumpkin :) Leave the pumpkin mixture to cool.

8. Let’s get our dough out of the fridge! You wanna separate it into a few smaller balls (I usually split in into the number of pieces that is the same as the number of eggs I used, so four). This just makes it easier to handle.

9. Flour your dough and start feeding it through your pasta machine on the widest setting. Run it through this setting at least six times, flouring and folding as you go. This is essentially kneading your dough for you and making it super duper lovely! Continue to feed your dough through the machine, reducing the width each time you put it through, until you reach desired thickness (I put it through to the second thinnest setting on my machine).

10. Now take your lovely long rectangle of rolled out dough and lay it on a FLOURED bench somewhere. Fold it in half and press lightly over the crease to make a small line. Fold it back out. Now go and get your yummy pumpkin and start spooning teaspoons of mixture a couple of cms apart, making even lines of pumpkin on your pasta of line. Only do this on one half of your pasta sheet though, and make sure you leave space around the edges of the pasta for later.

11. Fold your pasta back over and press down around the little pumpkin balls. You’ll notice that your top dough sheet is now smaller than the bottom (this is why we needed to leave the spaces!). Try to get as much air out as possible because this means that they’re gonna cook nicely :) Then cut them out into little squares with a knife or a pizza rolling knife thingo or an axe or whatever suits you. Repeat with rest of dough and filling.

12. When you’ve cut out your little ravioli, chuck em (gently) onto a floured tray and let them roll in floury blissfulness.

13. Now we cook our pasta (yay!) in a big pot of boiling salted water. Big pots are good, we don’t like to crowd the ravioli (they get claustrophobic). And this shouldn’t take more than about five minutes. Just cook til the pasta is tender and al dente (more fancy words).

14. Oooo. Now let’s make yummy sauce. Just get a little frypan, melt your butter, let it fry fry fry a bit and then chuck those sage leaves in and poof! Sage and burnt butter! Well, after it goes a bit brown, that’s when it’s done.

15. Now you serve it all up and you eat and you tell me how good it is :D

Blog Appetit!