A Quiet Day at Home

It was a bit overcast today, and rained a little bit. We had originally planned on going to the Outer Banks today, but we decided to stay home instead. We rolled lumpia today to take to our pastor and to a friend. My mom had fun learning how to make them, and now our house smells like a lumpia. :)

For dinner tonight, I created a new recipe to use up some butternut squash that a neighbor gave to us. I haven't ever been a huge squash fan, but I figured I could come up with something pretty good. So I settled on trying to make some ravioli. As a disclaimer, I haven't ever made real ravioli so there might be a better way than the way that I did it. End of disclaimer!

This recipe is using tofu in place of the ricotta cheese and eggs that the original recipes that I modified used (please don't let that scare you off, you can't tell its there). I actually merged together a couple of different ones to come up with my own. I served this with a bottled primavera sauce from the store. I had originally planned on making a creamy tomato sauce with this one but got lazy in the end. And we do need to use up some of the food from our pantry. ;) If you don't have the smoked spanish paprika, you could get the smoky flavor by adding some bacon or ham to the filling. If you like eating pigs anyway. :) Okay, enough disclaimers, here's the recipe:

Butternut Squash Ravioli

1 small butternut squash (about 1 ½ lb.)
½ c. water
1 box firm silken tofu (12.3 oz)
Juice from 1 lemon
Salt and pepper to taste
2 Tbs. olive oil
½ c. chopped onion
1 sprig rosemary
1 Tbs. minced sage
½ tsp. smoked Spanish paprika

Wonton wrappers

2 Tbs. olive oil
Salt and Pepper

To cook butternut squash, cut squash in half lengthwise; remove seeds and pulp. Place squash cut sides down in a baking dish, and add water. Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes or until tender when pierced with a fork, set aside to cool. Scoop out the pulp and set aside.

Put tofu and the lemon juice in a blender, process until smooth. Heat olive oil in a skillet, and sauté onion, rosemary, and sage until onion begins to brown. Combine tofu, onion mixture, squash and paprika in a small mixing bowl. Lay a wonton wrapper on a plate. Add a spoonful of squash mixture in the middle of the wrapper. Wet down the edges of the wrapper, and place a second wrapper on top. Press edges to seal, trying to get out air bubbles as much as possible. Try to make sure that the squash mixture doesn’t get out to the edge.

When you are ready to cook the ravioli, heat a pot of water on the stove and bring it to a simmer. Do not boil. You can salt the water at this point if you want to. Add ravioli 4 or 5 at a time, and cook for about 3 minutes. Remove from the water and drain. When ravioli are done, heat olive oil in a skillet, and sauté the ravioli for a minute or two on each side until they start to brown. Remove from the skillet and sprinkle with salt and pepper.