mushroom ravioli, habanada, gaeta olives, pinoli, parmesan

On Friday I was down with a bad cold, or something like that, so I wasn’t up to a trip to the Greenmarket, and I also didn’t trust my ability to put together a meal from scratch, so I reached into the freezer where I can usually find a good filled pasta that would do very well in such a pinch, then looked around for some sympathetic additions I might assemble with it.

It was a pretty ordinary meal, and similar to many I’ve already included on this blog; I wouldn’t normally have bothered to enter it here, except that I saw it looks pretty interesting in the picture.

  • between one and two tablespoons of olive oil heated slowly inside a large high-sided tin-lined heavy copper pan with a crushed piece of orange/gold habanada pepper, joined by 8 or so pitted Gaeta olives olives from Buon Italia and a handful of pine nuts, also from Buon Italia, slowly heated and browned earlier inside a small well-seasoned cast iron pan, sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper then added just before a 10-ounce package of frozen Rana portobello-mushroom-and-ricotta-filled ravioli rounds from Eataly that had just been boiled inside a large pot of well-salted water for 2 minutes and drained was slipped into the copper pan and mixed well with the sauce, everything now stirred together over a low flame, along with some of the reserved pasta water (in order to emulsify the liquid), the mix arranged inside 2 shallow bowls, some olive oil drizzled on top and around the edges, finished with freshly-grated cheese (Parmigiano Reggiano Hombre from Whole Foods Market) and a scattering of micro kohlrabi from Two Guys from Woodbridge

There was a cheese course.

  • a maturing Ardith Mae Chevre
  • a couple pinches of crushed dried wild Italian myrtle [Mirto/Myrtus], berries and leaves, from Buon Italia (in Italy, sometimes used as an alternative to juniper berries, in pork dishes especially – including wild boar, or, in Sardinia and Corsica, in making a liqueur)
  • a bit of micro red amaranth from Two Guys from Woodbridge
  • thin toasts of a She Wolf Bakery polenta boule