I love cooking, and the concept of making pasta from scratch (the way Italian grannies do), always fascinated me. Even though I had never tried my hand at it before, today I decided to make ravioli, a kind of stuffed pasta, for lunch. There were numerous recipes available on the net. The ingredients were simple, all you needed was some wheat flour, semolina & water. And kneading the dough & rolling out pasta is no difficult task for the Indian cook, so used to making rotis.
Making the filling was no problem, I just mixed some finely chopped coriander leaves & chillies with cheese. Rolling out the pasta was also easy,and I cut out dainty little circles for the shells using an upturned katori. So far so good.
Stuffing the shells and shaping them into semi-circular raviolis also came easily to my fingers, well experienced in filling paranthas with stuff. I made 12 raviolis, all ready to be cooked and eaten.
I put a large pan of water to boil, and added some salt and mustard oil (I didn't have olive oil) to it. I dropped 6 of the raviolis and noted the time. The recipe said they had to be cooked for 10 minutes. Hardly 5 minutes had passed when I noticed one of the raviolis leaking, some gross looking white stuff was floating on the water. I tried hard to fish out the offending piece with a slotted spoon. But I could not identify the culprit in the frothy white mess the water had become! Anyway, I still had 5 good ones inside the pan. The raviolis would float to the top once cooked(that's what the recipe said), and I would easily take them out. But then I realized that something had gone terribly wrong- all of the raviolis were leaking!! Half a dozen limp raviolis were floating around in a pan of water bubbling with white scum & yellow oil!! Pretty disgusting to look at.
Still I wanted to salvage whatever I could, out of the great smelling but gross looking mess my ambitious attempt at pasta making had become. By now more than 10 minutes had passed and my raviolis were coming undone, they were looking more like dead fish floating on the surface of a polluted lake. I hurriedly fished them out, one by one and arranged them on a plate(I simply cooked the remaining raviolis over a hot tava, didn't want to risk dumping them into boiling water this time).
Then I proceeded to make a dressing to pour over the raviolis (because there was no other way I could actually serve this thing to human beings). I whipped up a nice dressing, with creamy curd cheese, mustard & mint. It looked very pretty, and concealed the dead-fish look of the raviolis.
I was satisfied, I knew my parents would eat anything that had a cute green sauce over it. They did.
