For Mother’s Day on Sunday, we made homemade ravioli and tagliatelle. Making fresh pasta doesn’t take much time but it does require some patience. We began making the dough for the pasta around 9:30 am. The dough is quite simple to make, a basic mixture of flour and eggs. We have a Thermomix, its a multi function and cooking kitchen appliance that makes things such as dough making a breeze. It took less than two minutes to get the dough made then it needed to sit for 30 minutes to rest.

After it’s 30 minute rest, we got to make the ravioli. We used approximately half of the dough for ravioli. Umberto rolled out the dough until it was nearly cracker thin, we then used a small bowl to create a larger circle shape (we could say these were “raviolone”, big ravioli). After prepping the ravioli, I made the filling. I sauteed two eggplants until they were soft and then mixed with 250g of fresh sheep’s milk ricotta, seasoned with salt pepper. We then placed the ravioli, one-by-one into the ravioli cutter, filled the middle with the eggplant and ricotta mixture, closed the cutter and scraped off the over flowing edges of the pasta (which we saved to add to the tagliatelle mixture).

I made a tomato sauce for the ravioli using canned and diced tomatoes, olive, oil, salt, pepper and oregano. When we had finished making the ravioli, there was still some eggplant and ricotta mixture left, so I added that to the sauce. To make the tagliatelle though, we needed to use our pasta maker. The kids loved this part, they helped us to turn the “wheel” to make the tagliatelle. We served both pastas with the tomato, ricotta and eggplant sauce.