Total Time: 45 minutes
Preparation Time: 0 minutes
Active Cooking Time: 30 minutes
Yield: 1 pound fresh pasta
Make Ahead: Pasta can be kept at room temperature for several hours
Difficulty: Intermediate

Fresh pasta is surprisingly easy to make at home. Yes, you will need a hand-cranked pasta machine, but the ingredient list could not be shorter (just eggs and flour) and the results are much better than anything you can buy.

You will be making 1 pound of Fresh Egg Pasta. We will be cutting the pasta into fettuccine that you should use for the Fettuccine Alfredo recipe in this lesson.

While we suggest using a pasta machine to cut fettuccine, you can cut fresh sheets of pasta by hand. Simply fold each sheet crosswise into thirds or quarters. Use a sharp chef’s knife and cut perpendicular to folds to form noodles of desired width. This technique comes in handy when you want to make wider shapes, like pappardelle or tagliatelle.

Here are the guidelines for cutting fresh by hand:

Pappardelle: 3/4 to 1 inch wide
Tagliatelle: 1/4 to 3/8 inch wide
Fettuccine: 1/8 to 1/4 inch wide

• We like Italian-made hand-operated manual pasta machines. We’ve tested the Imperia and Atlas pasta machines—the two major brands in Italy and widely available in cookware shops around the world—and found them equally good.

Total Time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Active Cooking Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Yield: 4 to 6 as a first course
Make Ahead: Serve immediately
Difficulty: Intermediate

This elegant dish has become a popular offering on Italian trattoria menus. It features a multitude of flavors—squashy, sweet, savory, buttery, herbal, and nutty—working together to create complexity, and contrasting textures—silky filling and pasta, crunchy nuts—to add interest.

The butternut squash must first be cooked to drive off excess moisture and render it soft and velvety; we use a microwave to expedite and simplify the squash-cooking process. Grated Parmesan cheese in the filling not only adds flavor, it also acts as a binder that holds the filling together.

The browned butter sauce is simple, but very rich. This dish is best served in small portions either as a first course or a pasta course before the main dish.

This recipe uses fresh pasta from the Fresh Pasta recipe. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to make the fresh pasta. You will need a food processor and pasta machine in order to prepare the pasta. To be as efficient as possible, make the pasta dough, prepare the squash filling while the dough rests, then roll out the dough while the squash is in the refrigerator. By the time the dough has been rolled out into thin sheets, the filling will be cool enough to use.

http://www.americastestkitchenfeed.com/learn-to-cook/2013/02/4-tips-for-making-homemade-ravioli/

http://www.yumsugar.com/Butternut-Squash-Ravioli-Recipe-28700365

This makes quarts sauce, enough for 2 pounds pasta. (I think it would be fun to mix the
rigatoni with the zita. Safeway did not carry zita so I used just the rigatoni. I made the recipe
the day before so the flavors could meld.) Warning: this makes a huge amount. Good for a
party, however! Enjoy!