Buon Appetito!

Just in time for the weekend, a canopy of grey clouds stretched across the Sound to push me inside and away from any hope of summer sun. While the threat of rain may dampen thoughts of exploring nearby parks or long walks on the beach, it certainly encourages indoor creativity. The dismal weather all but forced me into a five hour tortellini-making endeavor.

After I discovered that conjuring up the folded Italian dumplings wouldn’t require a full-blown pantry overhaul, spinach tortellini secured a spot on the Saturday’s dinner menu. I zipped down to the supermarket to grab a couple missing ingredients—prosciutto, parmesan cheese, and ricotta. After reading through the green pasta dough directions as outlined in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Barcella Hazan, I set off on a daring adventure into the depths of la cucina italiana.

Making the tortellini filling was a cinch. I sautéed a handful of onions and prosciutto in butter, added chopped spinach to the pan, and dumped it all into a bowl. I added an egg yolk, freshly grated parmesan and ricotta cheese, along with a couple dashes of salt to taste.

The handmade pasta dough proved to be a much more difficult beast to tame. After cooking about eight ounces of frozen spinach and wringing it of all its green juice, I tossed it into the center of a volcanic mound of flour and whisked eggs. Little by little, I added flour to the egg-spinach mixture until the dough approached the non-sticky threshold. (Stuffed pasta flour should retain a slight amount of stickiness to allow for sealing later on.) I covered the green mass and let it relax for fifteen minutes.

The book called for a three step dough-thinning process involving a long dowel-like rolling pin. However, after an excruciatingly long kneading debacle, I couldn’t be bothered with authenticity. I smashed green blobs of dough onto the counter with my plain Jane rolling pin and cut out square wrappers that wildly varied in thickness and dimension. Keeping the extra dough sheltered in plastic wrap, I placed a pinch of the cheesy filling in the center of each wrapper, folded the squares into triangles and sealed the edges with my fingertips. Before the dough became too tough, I pinched the two points of each triangle (along the folded edge) together and left the beautiful little tortellini on the counter to dry.

By this point my friend Galen had arrived with a bottle of red wine and ingredients for a roasted vegetable soup. We plopped the tortellini in boiling water for a good ten minutes and enjoyed them with melted butter and a sprinkling of parmesan cheese.

While admiring my forest of misshapen pasta, I realized that devouring them alone would have been a shamefully depressing end to a day-long epic tortellini battle. In true Italian tradition, I savored each bite in good company with a glass of vino close at hand. Buon appetito!