Domestic Tuesdays - Resurrected Ravioli

I have about half a dozen go-to recipes. I either know them by heart, or they don't require much precision or measuring or even all the correct ingredients, for that matter. I usually make these on nights when I'm hanging out alone (which is a lot lately, as I've found that one of the symptoms of being happy with where you live is never wanting to go out), with the added bonus of having enough left-over to bring to work the next day for lunch. Most of these meals consist of Trader Joe's almost-pre-made things; crab cakes with a little salad, a bag of frozen Penne Arrabiata with some shrimp and asparagus thrown in or a bag of frozen Gnocchi al Gorgonzola with a cup of peas and some pancetta added...you get the idea.

I almost always have a package or two of Trader Joe's fresh ravioli in my house (except for right now, cause I'm broke as fuck and surviving on possibly-salmonella-laden peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. Glamours.) You can get packaged ravioli and tortellini at almost any grocery store, but as I've said before, I hate supermarkets. At Trader Joe's, it's in the refrigerated section over by the hummus and all that crap. Although it's not stated on the package, as long as you make sure you throw it in before the expiration date, they freeze really well and can be thrown right into boiling water from the freezer.


My favorite way to prepare this is to make a brown butter sauce that has about eleventy hundred cloves of garlic and some dried herbs thrown in, and then to toast a slice of sourdough bread that's been covered with yet even more garlic and buried in freshly grated Parmesan (which are three things I always have in my house, no matter how broke and dying from salmonella I am). I know the garlic is a bit much, but remember, I am frequently alone lately and my cat doesn't care how much I smell as though I'm trying to ward off vampires, so long as I keep sneaking him bits of pork products every so-often.

So last week I decided that I'd make this, my signature weeknight dish, and show all you darlings how you, too, can fool everyone and make it look like you know what you're doing in the kitchen! But I fucked it up! Can you believe it???

It started well enough; I added a big pat of butter to a warm pan while the ravioli hung out in the water.

And it's possible that things went wrong here, as I used room temp butter when I usually use cold, and also added a drizzle of olive oil so I could pretend I knew what I was doing.

But it's more likely that the next step was the fatal one. I normally use fresh chopped garlic and dried herbs (or fresh if I have it, which I usually don't), but this time I figured I'd throw in those awesome-in-all-other-instances pellets of frozen herbs that Trader Joe's carries. I've used them in soups and that sort of thing with great results, (and also I like that they look like the frozen worm pellets I once feed to the fish at an office I used to work at) but this time when I threw them in they got SUPER ANGRY and LOUD and sizzly in the hot oil and butter. Like, arm-burn-sizzly.

One thing that scares the shit out of me and makes me panic is really loud sizzly sounds when I'm cooking, which I know is dumb and I'm trying to overcome that but I never professed to being anything more than an amateur, ya know? Anyway, within a matter of minutes, I was left with, not my usual caramel-colored deliciously decedent sauce, but a slick black tar-like substance that tasted very much like asphalt.

Fuck. I didn't know what else to do as the ravioli was ready and I didn't have another pan to start the sauce over, correctly this time. I remembered the can of pasta sauce I had so it was with relief that I threw that into a sauce pan and gave it a taste. Oh shit. It wasn't "pasta sauce", but "tomato sauce", which is very different.

Oh hai, I'm trying to sabotage you.

But this is where my inner Domestic Bitch took over, cause I went into manual and added all the things I had put into the far-from-successful previous sauce; two frozen cubes of garlic and one of basil, a few shakes of red pepper flakes, a good amount of dried oregano and a couple pinches of that Herbs de Provence that I stole from the grocery store a while back.

When I tasted it, I was pretty fucking happy with it. I threw in the ravioli and a can of cannellini beans (white kidney beans) that I had rinsed. Next I covered the plate with Parmesan cheese because everything in the world tastes good when covered in cheese, and, this next step is vital so pay attention, I poured myself a glass of wine. I actually even used the real wine glass that had been left in my apartment by the girl who lived there before me, instead of my usual vintage tumbler with "Mom" written on it and tiny stars surrounding it. I know, I'm super grown up and what-not.

I settled onto the couch with my dinner that I had resurrected from certain doom to watch the latest episode of 30 Rock, and then realized that I'm kinda a lot like Liz Lemon but without the awesome job, hot boss with a sexy voice, money and all those other things. Awesome. I consoled myself by eating fruit for dessert:

Or maybe I had fresh baked cookies, I don't really remember.