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The +1 has a thing for making fresh pasta, and it often happens that when we go to the farmers market, his gaze will light upon some delectable piece of produce, and voila! The rest of the day is settled: we’ll make pasta dough in the afternoon and have fresh ravioli for dinner and probably invite someone over, because fresh ravioli is too good not to share. It’s simple enough:

Dough = Number of servings x (1 cup of flour + 1 egg)
Filling = Featured ingredient + soft cheese + hard, pungent cheese

It’s impromptu cooking, all done to taste and with guesstimates of how much dough we’ll need for the amount of filling we have. Thus far, we’ve made mushroom and quark ravioli, with rosemary browned butter, and arugula, panir, and fiore sardo ravioli, with browned butter. Last week, the +1 picked up mushrooms and fennel, and so I’m thinking mushroom ravioli (shiitakes, leaving the cheeses up to the recommendation of the lovely folks at Cowgirl) with raw fennel shaved over it. The fennel is light and crunchy and tastes of licorice, and given the textural contrast between it and soft, sauteed mushrooms, I’m not keen on putting it into the stuffing. I like ravioli to be soft and sumptuous, without hard little chunks hidden in the middle, ready to surprise you at any moment with a CRUNCH CRUNCH. Eurgh. Not to mention that cooked fennel is rarely cooked all the way through, with the result that it’s partly soft and partly crunchy, neither fish nor fowl. When it is cooked all the way through, it loses the sharp and fresh aspect of its flavor. Neither situation is desirable, so we’re sticking to the shaved fennel. The question is, what to do for a sauce?

In the past, I’ve done stuffed pastas with browned butter or cream sauces (e.g. TFL’s sweet potato agnolotti with sage cream sauce), but I’d like to do something other than browning butter in a pan and pouring it over the ravioli this time. It has to be something that will match the mushroom and the fennel without overwhelming them; if it were winter, some combination of oranges and fennel would be great. Would lemon juice work? I used to toss it into things all the time, until I figured out that that was the cause of the funky taste that I didn’t like (in risotto, in sauteed greens, in stir-fried haricots verts, etc.). Oops. I like lemon juice in a lot of things, but not in hot, savory preparations, it seems.

Perhaps simmering the ravioli in chicken stock for a kind of soup would work, but then ought it to be a big bowl of soup with ravioli floating around in it, or ought the ravioli sit in a small puddle just deep enough to moisten them, with lazy circles of olive oil floating on top? What would happen with the fennel? Would it work as a garnish, crunchy to start with, then gradually imparting its flavor to the soup? Or should it be banished from the ravioli altogether and turned into a salad? Maybe in the winter, we’ll do a meat and mushroom ravioli in broth, garnished with shaved fennel and orange zest. Savory and sweet; hearty and light; deep, rich mouthfeel and freshness.

Suggestions are welcome; I’ll let you know what we end up doing.

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