We served these mushroom ravioli for New Year's Eve dinner served just before midnight. They went perfectly with orange fennel salad. Fizzy wine would have been just right too but dry red wine goes very well too.
Saute mushrooms and garlic. Add chicken stock and grated parmesan cheese
Brown butter
We have started adding whole wheat flour to our pasta. It gives it a nutty flavour and helps to keep it from overcooking. The pasta is still wonderfully tender with no hint of "graininess". Roll the pasta with a hand-crank pasta maker, then use kitchen scissors to cut it in squares. (This pasta is great with nettles as well.)
After the pasta squares have been cooked to al dente, toss them in the browned butter.
Place buttered pasta square(s) on the plate and spoon mushroom mixture in the center. It's MUCH easier to put only one square on the plate....
Put a second pasta square overtop and garnish with fresh herbs, more grated cheese and more mushroom mixture. You'll notice that there is no extra mushroom mixture or grated cheese in the photo. Under normal circumstances, our vegetable stores have lots of mushrooms - brown, white, shitake, portobello, etc. etc. But on the Sunday afternoon before New Year's Eve, the ravening hordes have bought nearly all of them leaving only a few boxes of rather sorry looking brown mushrooms. When we got them home, we saw there were even fewer mushrooms in the box than we thought. Only the top layer was usable; the bottom layer was white ooze. And frankly, we just forgot to grate extra cheese. (The hazards of late night dining...) Even without the garnishes, the flavour was fabulous!
We were going to try this dish with fresh thyme rather than dill but the ravening hordes had taken all the thyme as well. Luckily, they had left some nice looking dill for us.
