A review, an inspiration, a ravioli

So I have to apologise for not having posted in 3 weeks. Honestly, I've just been busy with exams, and although I managed to get time to cook, I was just too tired to post. I'm back now, and I'll try to make up for those posts in the coming days. I would also ask you to pardon the poorly taken photo, I'm not much of a photographer, and this was the only good one.

That being said...My grandmum has been at our house for a 10 days now. On mother's day, I ordered a mother's day lunch from Qmin. Now usually, their food is delicious. Their chinese meal is to die for, and their portion sizes are massive! To put this in perspective, the Qmin chinese meal for 2 people is enough for up to 5 people. This time, though, I have to say I was disappointed. The portion sizes were still decent, 4 person meal served 6 people(my two sets of grandparents, my father and mother, and me), but the quality of the food was not good. The vegetables were undercooked, the pasta was boring and the paella tasted more like a porridge. To make it worse, all the dishes seemed to lack spice. It was definitely unlike Qmin. The best part of the meal was the starters, and even they were only decent. 

The pasta in the meal was a pesto pasta with walnuts and cheese. I wasn't blown away, and so I decided to make a better version of it. My idea was a pesto ravioli with a ricotta walnut filling. Now my granddad isn't hugely interested in ravioli, so I also made a cheese board, but that's for another post. 

Any ravioli has 3 main elements - The dough, the filling and the sauce. The dough was basic, 3 eggs and 300 grams of flour to make enough raviolis for all of us(we were also eating the cheese platter so this is about half of what we would eat otherwise). 

The filling was more interesting. It was a ricotta-walnut filling, and I added a few more ingredients to make it pop. I roasted some walnuts to start, and I mixed a bit of ricotta with some salt. After crushing the walnuts, I mixed it into the ricotta, leaving decently big chunks of walnut so there would be some bite to the ravioli. I also added a bit of lemon zest to the ricotta for a bit of acidity. As I was making the pasta, I also noticed some button mushrooms which I'd washed and kept aside. I decided to mince them and stir-fry them with rosemary and thyme until the mushrooms were cooked. Then, I added it to the ricotta filling and that was that. 

For the sauce, I made a beautiful pesto I'd seen in the Salt Fat Acid Heat show. Now the pesto is a good sauce, but it's very thick. To make it a bit thinner and creamier, I heated it up before serving and added a tiny bit of heavy cream. Heating it up helped melt the parmesan, making it much smoother. 

I also decided to pan-fry the raviolis in the leftover mushroom oils, giving them a nice crispness at the base. I then plated them in a bowl, putting 5 raviolis per bowl and topped them off with the pesto and a garnish of grated parmesan. 

I loved the pasta, honestly. It was a basic idea, but it was seriously good. I'd recommend roasting the pine nuts before adding them into the pesto, but other than that, there's really nothing.

Pesto recipe - https://www.saltfatacidheat.com/fat/basil-pesto