Tribute to Julia Child

I absolutely love, love, LOVE Julia Child.  Period.  There's nothing more to say about it, but let me say this anyway:  we are seriously kindred spirits.  We have so much in common.  We both love to laugh.  We are both willing to take risks.  We look at life through rose-colored glass or glass half-full.  We both love food - cooking, writing, reading, talking and eating it.  We are adventurers, lovers, jokers, sisters and friends.  However, one thing we do not have in common (at least I don't think we do) is our success rate on new recipes.

Tonight, I decided to take a little risk and make butternut squash ravioli from scratch - dough, filling, everything.  I looked for a good recipe online and in my many cookbooks for about an hour.  That was mistake number one.

You can find many great things on the internet.  You can find almost anything about anything on the World Wide Web.  But one thing that you probably should not find, and I definitely did not find, is a homemade, from-scratch, pasta dough and butternut squash filling recipe.

Okay, let me clarify.  For those of you who are technologically sound, I'm sure you totally disagree.  Jess, you are absolutely mistaken.  You can definitely find EVERYTHING on the internet.  So, I will concede to that statement.  I was NOT looking in the right places, and I did not do thorough research for this project.

I started the evening by brushing the butternut squash halves with olive oil, placing on a cookie sheet and roasting for about 45 minutes in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit.  While the squash was roasting, I started in on the ravioli dough.  Mix three cups flour and one half teaspoon salt in an electric mixer with a dough hook.  Add four eggs, one by one, into the flour.  Drizzle two tablespoons olive oil into the flour and egg mixture.  Dough should start to form and cling to dough hook.  Sounds simple, right?

NOT.  As soon as the eggs had been added to the flour mixture, I realized that there was NO WAY that the measly two tablespoons of oil would cause the dough to adhere to the dough hook.  So, I moved on to ad-lib cooking.

My thought process went a little something like this: Maybe if I add a little bit more olive oil.  Hmm, that looks alright.  Should I add a little more?  Here we go.  Well, that's definitely not making these ingredients dough-like.  I will just add an extra egg.  Hmm...


You get the point.  I had no idea how to redeem the recipe now, so I did what I always do.  Act like I know what I'm doing, even though secretly (or in this case not-so-secretly) I haven't a clue.

I continued on my way.  Wrapped the dough in plastic wrap, and let sit for 30 minutes for the "gluten to settle".  Put the squash mixture together.  Roll out the dough, brush with egg wash, plop down mini piles of butternut squash.  Boil in salted water for 10-15 minutes, and remove with a slotted spoon.  Serve with pasta sauce.

Everything went great the rest of my cooking experience, until the taste test.  It was a mouthful of chewy, almost licorice-like dough with a little taste of butternut squash.

So, of course, I left some for my husband to try.  Because that's what good wives do, even when the meal is a complete FAILURE.  You know the rest of the story.  He tries ravioli.  Eats more than he probably should, but only because the boy's hungry -- not because the food is good.  And then the leftovers go promptly into the trash.

Next time, IF there is a next time of standing in the kitchen for three hours to make pasta and filling (instead of the three minutes it take to buy butternut squash ravioli from the frozen foods section of Marsh), I will do better research, ask lots of questions, hire a sous chef and also an iron chef.

But until then...I will kick back my feet, look at this terrible mess of dough, squash and sauce and LAUGH.  Because that's what I do way better than cooking.  LAUGH.  I have a feeling Julia Child would LOVE to see this.