Pumpkin Ravioli

pumpkin ravioli What a week! Thank goodness it’s finally Spring Break! I’m so excited, J will be back in a few days and then we are heading to Istanbul for a week. I’m going to see me some Whirling Dervishes (Isn’t that just fun to say??) and eat oodles and oodles of turkish delight! I love vacation 
pumpkin
In the meantime, I promised you a recipe for ravioli! Last Thursday was a really frustrating day at work (it should have been a sign of what was to come this week! yikes!!) and when I came home from work I really needed to work out some stress in the kitchen! Making ravioli was the perfect way to do that because you get to take out all of your aggression on some pasta dough which is really gratifying when you beat and pound something and then as if by magic it turns into a delicious dinner!I had these little potsticker/ravioli molds that I’ve been dying to use, but J isn’t a big fan of pasta so they have been sitting in the drawer for a few weeks. So since he wasn’t here, I was having pasta for dinner. I gave up on those molds about halfway through, they were a bit tedious, but pretty! I just started making little triangles and pressing the edges with a fork on each side to seal. Less pretty, but much faster and equally tasty.spoon in a small amount of fillingsqueeze and trim edges

I really had my heart set on butternut squash ravioli, which they serve at this restaurant we used to love going to back home. But apparently, like so many other seemingly average things, I couldn’t find my beloved squash here in the middle east. Maybe if I lived in a bigger city with a fancy organic grocery… Alas, I deferred to my equally delicious friend, the canned pumpkin, and he didn’t let me down. [Read more...]

Vegetarian Pumpkin Lasagna

With Christmas right around the corner, I can’t help but start to think about lasagna. Now, this might seem like a strange train of thought to you, but hey I’m a strange person so you’ll have to excuse it (or not, your choice I suppose). Anyhow, lasagna is a traditional Christmas dish where I come from and I think it’s far superior to oh, say, ham or roast turkey. Turkey is for Thanksgiving as far as I’m concerned, but I suppose if you live across the pond and you don’t have Thanksgiving you need an excuse to roast up a turkey and then Christmas seems like a fine time to do that. And well don’t even get me started on ham. Ham? How is that festive? It’s a pig, er big hunk of lunch meat! And what part of the pig does that even come from anyway? It’s bum? It can’t be it’s bum it’s got a big ‘ol bone in the middle of it…is it a giant thigh? I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to.

So when a coworker was on a pumpkin baking spree a few weeks ago I thought, hey do you know what would be really delicious? Pumpkin Lasagna. She was kind enough to provide me a couple cans of the coveted squash (canned pumpkin isn’t a staple on shelves round these parts).

[Read more...]