[Sca-cooks] celery dishes and ravioli makers and stuffed pasta

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jan 1, 2006, at 3:48 AM, Stefan li Rous wrote:

> So what is a "celery dish"? Is this a dish shaped like celery? Or a  
> special dish for serving celery? If the latter, what is it like?

It's an oblong dish about 9-12 inches long, with a slightly raised  
edge, suitable for holding celery sticks/ribs.

>
> >>>>
> A second gift is on order...Phillip gave me a ravioli maker that's an
> attachment for my KitchenAid mixer.  However, in order to be able  
> to use
> it, I need the pasta roller...which he didn't realize until the thing
> came in...so I ordered the pasta roller today
> <<<<
>
> So what does a ravioli maker do for you? The pasta roller rolls the  
> pasta out to a uniform shape, but what does the ravioli maker add  
> to that which isn't just as easy doing by hand? You lay out one  
> sheet of pasta, put scoops of filling on the pasta, then drape with  
> another sheet and squeeze the sheets together between the filling,  
> right?

Have you ever seen one of those rolling pins with cookie molds/stamps  
embossed into them, so the dough you roll can be cut along the lines  
you stamp into pretty little cookies (springerle come to mind, if  
they're the ones I'm thinking of)? A ravioli maker is sort of a crank- 
powered device working along similar lines. Instead of the plain  
rollers of the ordinary pasta machine, wherein you load slabs or  
sheets of dough that are rolled through to become sheets or thinner  
sheets, respectively, you'd use the ordinary rollers of the pasta  
machine first to roll out the dough, then you stick one end each of  
two sheets of dough between the rollers of the ravioli maker so  
they're held in place. You then lay a line of filling (enough to fill  
one row of maybe four or five square raviole, however wide your  
machine is) between the two sheets (suitably draped so as to leave an  
obvious opening between them). The rollers grab dough and filling  
between them as you turn them, form, pinch and seal, and score/cut a  
row of ravioli for you. You then add another row's worth of filling,  
turn the crank, and so on until all the dough and, you hope, all the  
filling are pressed and cut into ravioli shapes.

One problem with such a machine, at least in my experience, is that  
only certain types of fillings work really well, and too much  
deviation from the intended filling concepts of the machine's  
manufacturers can lead to pots of boiling, free-floating pasta  
squares in filling soup.

> What types of stuffed pasta are there? I can think of ravioli and  
> manicotti, but are there more?

Agnolotti (a crescent shape, like a pot-sticker without the pleated  
edges) and tortellini come to mind. Then there are the larger  
tortelli, stuffed shells, canneloni, and probably quite a few more. See

http://www.italianfoodforever.com/iff/articles.asp?id=18

for some more names and descriptions.

Adamantius (scheduled to manufacture more wontons today)



"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04