Donald Duck and Ravioli. Just read it.

First things first: Useless Information.

I will now insert a random fact at the beginning of each blog entry. Why? Because I found a list of random facts, and I want to share. Be grateful.

Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn’t wear pants.

Okay, moving on.

Today in food class we studied the region called Emilia-Romagna. According to The Food of Italy by Claudia Roden, “The people of Emilia-Romagna eat more, care more and talk more about food than anyone else in Italy. They like nothing better than to get together, eat, drink, tell jokes, sing and discuss the merits of dishes.” Doesn’t that just sound wonderful?

 These are the most important products from Emilia Romagna:

·         Parmesano Reggiano (first made in Reggio; first sold in Parma, hence the name)

·         Balsamic vinegar

·         Tortellini

·         All kinds of stuffed fresh pasta

·         Prosciutto di Parma

·         Mortadella salami

·         Ragu (meat sauce)

We made fresh ravioli pasta filled with cheese and spinach, in a ragu sauce, and panna cotta (cream custard) with berry sauce. Keep reading! This may have been my favorite cooking day so far. (It beats last week’s calamari by a landslide.)

First, the ragu: Chop up an onion, a carrot, some celery, a garlic clove, and some parsley. Melt some butter with oil in a pot and sauté everything you just chopped, and some basil leaves. (You aren’t supposed to chop basil. Did you know that? I didn’t.) After a while, add the meat (at least two kinds). We used pork, beef, and some sort of sausage. Cook until the meat is brown. Add some red wine, and simmer until it evaporates. Then add some salt and pepper, a bay leaf, tomato sauce, and a little meat stock. Let it cook for a long time, preferably 2 or 3 hours.

While that simmers, start on the panna cotta. Put half a pint of cream with about 2 tablespoons of sugar in a pot. Add a vanilla bean (You can use vanilla extract, but we used the real thing!). Let it simmer 2 or 3 minutes, but don’t boil. Dissolve gelatin (1 teaspoon powdered gelatin, but we used these weird gelatin sheet things) in cold water and then beat well into the cream. Pour into little dishes. Put it in the fridge to chill.

Now, make the ravioli. Whip up some fresh egg pasta (flour, eggs, pinch of salt, drizzle of oil) and after it’s smooth and elastic, wrap it in plastic wrap and let it rest.

For the filling: Wash some fresh spinach. Boil some water. Cook the spinach for a couple of minutes until it boils down. Then drain it, chop it up, and let it cool. Add about 8 ounces or so of ricotta, 1 egg, a pinch of salt and pepper, a pinch of nutmeg (we grated fresh nutmeg; I’ve never done that before!) and about 2 ounces of grated parmesan. Mix it all up.

Use your pasta press (because EVERYONE has one of these handy) and roll out some long, thin sheets. Put one sheet down on a floured surface. Dot it with mounds of the filling.

Then cover with another sheet, pressing with your fingers around the mounds to stick the dough together. Use a pastry wheel to cut out the ravioli. Boil them (We boiled them in the water that we cooked the spinach in) for a few minutes until they are done.

Toss them in a skillet with the ragu sauce to coat. Then, dump it out onto a serving platter. Put the bay leaf on top to make it nice and pretty.

For the panna cotta sauce, we made two kinds. Strawberry and blackberry.

Just put berries in a blender with some freshly squeezed lemon juice and some sugar.


Turn the panna cotta dish upside down onto a plate drizzled with sauce. Add more sauce. Add as much sauce as you want. Make designs with the sauce.

Put a strawberry on top, sliced like a flower.

Then, dig in.

I don’t think I really need to explain why this was so good. Pasta stuffed with cheese and covered in sauce can never fail. Neither can cream, mixed with sugar, drizzled with berries. It just can’t. It’s always going to be a winner.

If you want to see more pictures of the food, I added them to the "More of Florence" album on the right side of the page.

Coming up next: Friday trip to Cortona!