Ravioli

Once upon a time, at a restaurant, I had some lobster ravioli in some sort of cream-tomato sauce, and it was awesome. I'm not about to spring for lobster at home, but I saw these three-cheese-spinach raviolis at Wegmans, and decided to give them a whirl; it was the sauce I'd loved best, and that I can do a fair approximation of.

There will come a day when I learn to make a cream sauce from scratch, but it is not this day. This is jarred alfredo sauce, most of a pint of baby tomatoes, and fresh sage and thyme from our little herb garden by the back porch.

I put the water on to boil, and I put the sauce in the pan, and I turned on the burners, while I set about chopping. At least, I thought I turned on the burners. In actuality, I turned on one burner to boil the water, and on the other I just started spewing gas into the kitchen. It was on low, but it was going for a good five or ten minutes while I screwed around with the washing and chopping. The water came to boiling and I chucked the ravioli into the pot, and the herbs and tomatoes into the sauce, and then I wondered why the sauce wasn't cooking. Jerry said he thought he smelled gas.

I grew up with electric stoves, so ever since cooking on gas I've had this terror of what happens if I do exactly this. When I turn it down, and it goes through the sparker stage, does it spark and ignite the whole shebang? Do we all go up in flames? Well, given that the burner two slots over was already on fire and nothing was igniting, we felt fairly safe just turning it off real fast. I don't remember even hearing the sparks start clicking. Nobody exploded. We opened some windows and let a breeze go through for a minute before turning it on again. I imagine this is not a guaranteed outcome.


Anyway, as a consequence, the raviolis were done well before the sauce was. I had wanted to let the sauce simmer for a while, until the tomatoes exploded and bled into the sauce, and the herbs leached in, but I was hungry, so I just let it bubble for a few minutes and then dumped the raviolis in. I let them cool a few minutes, put them in in some bowls, and washed up while they cooled further, then sprinkled a little grated Parmesan cheese on them and they were ready.

They were delicious. The little one agreed, but only partially. He enjoyed sticking his fork in them and saying, "Mmmm!" but he didn't actually eat many of them.

I do want to try it with explodey tomatoes; next time I'll start the sauce before the pasta water, instead of at the same time. And I'll remember to turn the flame on instead of just the gas.