Butternut Squash Ravioli with Balsamic Browned Butter Sauce

I've been craving butternut squash ravioli for awhile now, and since we have church at 9am this year, it gives us plenty of time to make fancier dinners (if we feel like making them).

I had some leftover butternut soup but no eggs...

I found a recipe for eggless pasta that I thought would work for ravioli here, the recipe made a lot of pasta, we got tired of making ravioli and turned the last few pieces into thin noodles, which we'll use for dinner tomorrow maybe*.  

My Mister ran the pasta roller while I took the leftover butternut squash soup, which had thickened quite a bit during it's week as leftovers, and added a bunch of parmesan cheese.  My 4-year old wanted to help too, so I set him up cutting the strips of pasta into little rectangles.  I spooned teaspoonish amounts onto the little rectangles of pasta, wet the edges, and crimped around the edges with a fork (on both sides).  

When we were about ready to eat, I boiled the ravioli for 3-4 minutes, until they looked cooked, and as my mister was setting the table and draining the ravioli, I made the best part of the dinner.  

Online, the suggested sauce to serve with butternut squash ravioli is sage browned butter sauce.  I don't like sage, so I looked around a bit and decided to go with a balsamic browned butter sauce instead.  I figured I've made a butternut squash dish that had balsamic vinegar in it before, so how could I go wrong? (Usually, when I say that to myself it doesn't end well, but this time it worked out.)  

Balsamic Browned Butter Sauce

6 TBSP unsalted butter

2 TBSP balsamic vinegar

The complete recipe can be found here, but I decided I wasn't in the mood for nuts, so I called it good.  I melted the butter, and watched and stirred.  Of course the second you look away, it will turn brown, so don't get distracted.  As soon as it turns brown, remove from heat and stir in the vinegar- be careful it shoots little sparks of hot liquid at you when you do that.  

Immediately spoon over your ravioli, add a little salt and pepper and parmesan cheese, and you're good to eat. 

*The pasta turned out more like wonton wrapper than pasta.  Next time I think I'll need to get the right kind of flour, or make our regular egg noodle pasta, or maybe we rolled it too thin.  I'm not a pasta expert, so if anyone has any suggestions, I'm open to ideas.

Over all, it turned out really good.  I've thought about what I would use for filling if I didn't have the butternut squash soup, and I think it would be fine (or even better- mine was pretty soft consistency, and I think a little texture would be nice) to just bake a squash and mash it up with some butter and salt and parmesan cheese (and brown sugar if you want it sweet).  It would just be one more step that you'd have to do before you could fill the pasta.  I loved the browned butter sauce- I didn't measure, and I don't think I put enough balsamic vinegar into the butter, but the flavor was wonderful.  Next time I'll make sure to pre measure the vinegar so I don't miss out on the full flavor.   With a better pasta recipe, this would really be an amazing make-it-yourself dinner.  If you wanted to make it even easier, you could buy the ravioli and just make the sauce- it was really good.

Photo Update

A teaching CP some sweet soccer skills.

CP at his preschool Halloween Parade.

Our shelf of squash/pumpkins- many of these are now carved and sitting on the porch.

Kyle's getting this area all cleaned up- no more weeds and wood scraps and yard tools jumbled together.

I love watching chickens run across a yard.

J and neighbor B herding the chickens back to their coop.

This was a lot of work.  I did it with the rotary mower.  I was SORE the next day.  The grass hadn't been mowed in a long time, as I mentioned in the previous post- I had to have the boys come out and lift the grass up with rakes so the mower would even catch it- it was so long and matted down.

Not a huge grape harvest this year...  

We're already figuring how many we can drink each month to make them last a year.  :)

Fall Clean Up (part three)

I didn't take pictures again.  But, we forced the boys out the door this morning and they did great picking grapes until the first bucket was full, after that it was painful to keep them working.  We ended up with four buckets to put in the steam juicer.

While we were picking grapes, my Mister mowed the field, pulled the hoses from the big garden and stretched them out on the cement to get warm so he could coil them up and put them away, then he mowed the garden.  We didn't plow because we're not sure if we'll be able to garden there next year when the house is being built.  He did plow the neighbor's garden while I sat and visited.  Our neighbor gave us some horseradish, a huge banana squash, a turkey egg, and some walnuts.  It was a fruitful visit.  :)

Next, I wanted to get the yard mowed, so I pulled out the rotary mower and made the boys come out to rake the grass up so the mower would catch it.  It was really long and matted down, so that took awhile.

My Mister cleaned out the boat and laid the cover out to dry.  We need to cover it with a more waterproof tarp this winter so we don't get water build up inside it.  He also weed whacked around the driveway under the grapes.

Next up: making grape juice.  I also need to clean out the black raspberry patch, but I'm not sure I'm going to get to that.

Things I've been doing

While playing out in the yard, I discovered a few HUGE peaches (I posted a picture in an earlier post), we canned those and got one canner full of quart jars.  Not a lot, but it's more than we had before.

I also discovered that the apple trees had a few apples on them.  My Mister picked them and we had a bucket full.  Most of them had some bad spots to cut out, but after all that we still ended up with 6 quarts of applesauce.

I've been dehydrating more plums, and made a batch of plum/pear jam.  It looks just like the plum jam, but you can taste the pear in it.  I like it, but I don't love it so much that I think it's a good use of my small supply of pears.

I attempted pear sauce in the victorio strainer, but ended up with a slightly thicker juice.  Not quite what I was hoping for.  Searching online revealed the best way to make pear sauce is to peel and chop the pears, then cook them down.  Pear sauce was my idea to avoid having to peel them (otherwise I would have just canned the pears).  Now I'll either can the rest, or dehydrate them.  I'm looking for the easiest option here, since I'm running out of time before the great grape deluge of 2011 kicks in.

When I was picking the pears, I was trying to think of a way to store them so they didn't bruise while they were ripening, and I thought of these cardboard crates the raspberries came in.  They worked great. I just wish I had twice as many.  If you have any, or ever get any, save them for me!  They're not quite big enough for storing winter squash in, so I'll have to think of something else to use them for over the winter, so that I don't have to justify the space they'd take up sitting empty somewhere.

UPDATE:  Thanks to the powers of Google, I discovered this blog post that talks about juicing pears in a steam juicer and canning the juice, then running the pulp through the strainer for the sauce.  My only concern is that with the juice removed, the pulp will be bland, but I think if I don't cook the pears until there is no juice left, it should work out well.

While picking pears, I noticed that the old "weed" rosebushes are covered in rose hips.  I've been reading up on rose hips and am currently deciding what to do with them, they're not ready yet, so I have some time.  I have fond memories of eating rose hips while sitting on the roof of the old grainery that used to be behind our family home.

As far as a new camera goes, I've been holding off.  I do have my iphone that can take pictures, but I'm currently trying to decide whether I want a fancy camera or if a point and shoot will serve my purposes...

I'm just a little black rain cloud, hovering over the honey tree...

The other day I noticed the clump of bees hanging on the outside of the hive.  Today my Mister finally had some time to go investigate.  He opened the thing up and decided that the crooked combs had been rebuilt crookedly again really needed to be cleared out.  

He cut quite a bit out and spaced the now-empty bars in between straight comb so that they hopefully rebuild straight this time.  This is the picture where I got a little too close and got chased away by a couple of angry bees.  They don't like people stealing their honey.  After getting the combs cleared up, the bees were too riled up for him to do anything with the bees on the outside of the hive, so we're hoping it's not a major problem.  We'll let them calm down for a few days and take a closer look then.  I'm hoping they were just running out of space inside, and had started building comb on the outside- and not that they are getting ready to swarm...  With how much honey we had to cut out, we're a little worried about winter anyway.  We'll see how much they have left and how much more they can produce between now and winter.  

Just a couple of fatalities.

We tried some of the honey comb.  The kids were not a fan of the wax.  The honey was so sweet that I had a hard time eating my spoonful.  It needed a good biscuit or fresh bread or something.

With top bar hives, you don't use an extractor, you mash all the comb up in a big pot.

Scoop it into jars.

Cover the jar with a mesh-material.  We used cheesecloth, but I think tulle would work a lot better.  (UPDATE: the morning after setting the jars up, very little honey had dripped into the bottom jars, so I stopped by the fabric store and bought 1/2 yard of tulle- it should last for quite awhile- the difference was amazing, at this rate they might be done in a few hours!)

Place an empty jar (with ring) on top of the jar with mashed honeycomb.

Tape them together really well.

Invert.

It's supposed to be done by tomorrow morning, but I think the cheesecloth is slowing things down.  If it doesn't look like there's been much progress by morning, I'll go by the fabric store to get some tulle to try again.

Another thing to do with zucchini

Slice it thin, and lay it on top of a pizza.  Sprinkle parmesan cheese on top (because zucchini is so good with parmesan).  This pizza was about my favorite one we've ever made (My Mister made it- he's getting to be quite the pizza chef).  It had sauce, mozzarella cheese, bacon, green peppers, zucchini and parmesan cheese.  The other pizza (the one that the kids ate) had bacon and pineapple.  (Obviously this is not a vegetarian dinner like the label says, but leave the bacon off and you're good (maybe slightly less good)).

July 24th (observed)

Since Pioneer Day fell on a Sunday, it was "observed" today, and my Mister got the day off work.  He went for a bike ride in the morning while I ran hills on the treadmill (he got the better deal this time...).

Other things we did (I just realized that several of the pictures are from Saturday...):

These apricots are actually from yesterday.  He picked them saturday and we didn't get to them.  The mushy ones we pureed and then canned.  8 of each kind.

We did beans on Saturday, and also had some chicken broth from the home raised chickens we ate last week, chicken broth and green beans have the same processing requirements, so we put the broth in jars and canned it.  Two and a half pints.  

The boys decided to move their fort from the bush by the front door to this pine tree.  

My Mister spent a lot of Saturday organizing the garage.  He finished (for the most part) today and we can now park in it!  He also built a bike rack out of pvc pipe so we won't have bikes thrown down all over the place anymore.

His other major project was mowing.  He mowed all around the garden, while I played with Keiko dog, she liked sniffing in the weeds, so I think she was a little sad to see the whole thing mowed.

He mowed the field.  There is so much cut grass that we really need to go rake it up.  Who knows when that will happen though.  Taja dog enjoyed the clipped grass.  She made herself comfortable in a shady spot and watched Kyle clean out the garage.

We also got 3 eggs today.  They're still pretty tiny, but seem to be getting bigger.  

Garden Update 7/12

We've gotten three tiny eggs in the last three days, so just one hen is laying still.  The top two eggs in this photo are ours, the larger egg is from the store.  We need to make sure our hens are getting more greens, the yolks should be much darker than the store bought egg.

The nesting boxes that my Mister built.  We worried they'd be too high, and that we should put in a ladder, but before we got that far, we found an egg in the center box.  It's amazing to me that the chickens knew where to lay the egg even though the nesting box had only appeared in the coop the day before we got our first egg.  

It had been awhile since my Mister checked on the bees, so he thought it would be a good thing to do before we went on our camping trip....

This one looks good.  The bees are capping the honey.

This one doesn't look so good.  We had the follower board blocking the last third of the hive or so.  The bees filled up all their available space and got into the back area, where they started to make some comb that crossed several top bars.  My Mister had to cut those combs off, then he moved the follower board, opening up the entire hive, so hopefully the bees rebuild straight.  They weren't too happy with what he was doing, and he got stung once on the leg.  He came in and got some long pants on (maybe a duh thing right there...) and was fine.  He left the comb he cut off in a bucket outside the hive so the bees could gather the honey in it and move it back inside.  

We set up the automatic watering system in the big garden.  No more watering by hand!

One of the zucchini plants in the raised bed garden is blossoming.  I bet we come home from our camping trip to some zucchini.

I found this weird mushroom.  The big parts were in a ring around a smaller center part, like a flower.  We didn't eat it.

Cherry tomato.

Paste tomatoes.

Bees were on the onion flowers.  I think I'm supposed to knock the stocks over so that the bulb gets bigger, but it's hard to when the bees are enjoying the flowers so much.  I wonder what onion honey tastes like...

It's hard to see from this picture, but there was a lady bug on the artichoke plant.  I noticed aphid-looking bugs the other day, and sprayed them off with the hose, so I was glad to see the lady bug.  Hopefully her friends are around and they're taking care of the aphids.  The good things that come when you don't use pesticides...  Which reminds me.  When I was a kid, my parents hired a neighbor boy to come do some yard work for them.  As a joke, he used round up to kill a big Y in the field (his family were all BYU fans, my family were UofU fans).  For the parade, we had most of that family sitting next to us, and they joked about using round up to put another Y in the field.  My comment was that if they could find an organic way to put the Y in the field, they could go for it.  I just didn't want to cause problems for the bees and ladybugs and all the other beneficial insects that help us maintain our garden.  

Summer so far...

The boys have been busy with various day camps.  They took a sewing class one week, and made pillow cases and these backpacks, they loved it and want to do it again next year.

We all (except Baby E) ran the Centerville Fun Run.  Mister and I ran the 5k (he took 3rd in his age group, and I was 13th in mine- with a personal best- 8:36 minute miles), J ran the 1 mile, A ran the 1/2 mile (he fell at the beginning, but got right back up and finished with bloody knees), and CP ran the 1/4 mile (which was the cutest thing ever).

A couple of parade floats were passing out otter pops, which Baby E was really happy about.  

A and his friend S show that BYU and Utah could be friends if they really wanted to (although A says he doesn't like BYU anymore, phew...)  They're wet because they went down a big inflatable water slide at the carnival at the park.

Here's CP going down- he went down 3 times in a row.

J going down.

A couple of weeks ago J and my Mister did the Tsunami Tri over at the rec center.  J did the novice 150M swim, 3 mile bike, 1 mile run.  He took 2nd place in his age group!  My Mister took 3rd in his age group (he likes 3rd apparently).

After the Tri, we came home, I went for a run, we did some garden work, then we headed up to Park City for a Mtn Bike race.  J won his race.