Purple-licious Beet Ravioli ~ Recipe

I promised you a great beet recipe and here it is!
A delicious pasta made with fresh beets from your garden and turned into a stunning purple ravioli :)

Don't you just love the color of this?!

To get your dough started you need to cook 3 or 4 fist sized red beets with their skins intact and just the tops trimmed off. That will keep them from bleeding to much in the water as they cook. It takes roughly 30 minutes for them to be fork tender when tested and once they are cooked you can dump them into your sink and you just grab them and give them a bit of a squeeze and they will pop right out of their skins *grin*.

You need two cups of pureed beets so add them chunk by chunk into your blender until you reach the 2 cup mark and then you will continue pureeing them along with 1 egg and 1 tablespoon of olive oil until they are nice and smooth.

To finish your pasta dough you will need:

2 eggs
3 1/2 cups of flour
1 teaspoon salt

Place your flour and salt in a large bowl or directly on your counter and make a nice big well in the center. In the well add your eggs, and beet puree.

With a fork slowly start to beat your eggs, mixing them into your beet puree and then start to gradually pull the surrounding flour into your wet ingredients until it has taken on a dough like consistency and you can start to work it with your hands. It takes about 10 minutes to get a beautifully soft and silky dough by hand or about 6 minutes if you are using your mixer with the dough hook attachment :)

Once you've finished kneading cover your dough with a greased bowl and let it rest for 20 minutes.

Now comes the fun! Using your pasta machine work your dough through it, dusting it with flour as necessary and gradually tightening the rollers until you have a really thin dough roughly 3mm thick. If you don't have a pasta machine you can definitely use your rolling pin to roll out your sheets of dough as well!

I made a really quick potato, bacon & cheese filling by steaming potatoes until tender, mashing them smooth, adding 1/2 pound of cooked and crumbled bacon, one medium sized sweet onion that I diced and sauteed, stirring it all together and then seasoning it with salt & pepper.

My husband loves this perogi type filling but you could easily use spinach & feta or pine nuts & chard with goat cheese or... well the possibilities are endless *grin*.

Place a teaspoon sized blob of your filling in increments roughly 2 inches apart down the length of your first piece of dough and then top with a second rolled out length of your beet dough. Then using a butter knife or pizza cutter slice each section of dough apart and fold each edge over itself and lightly press it with a fork to seal each little ravioli pocket.

That's it! You've got some beet-a-licious ravioli to serve your family :)

To cook your ravioli bring a large soup pot of salted water to a boil and cook your ravioli for about 10 minutes. You don't want to cook them at a rapid boil though as this might tear your little raviolis apart so reduce the heat so they gently boil in the water. This will reheat your filling and make sure that the thicker folds of dough around the edges cook through.

You know I completely forgot to take a photo of them cooked! We were so excited to taste them that we devoured them before I even thought to grab my camera *grin*. I can tell you that it was plenty for our family of 5 for dinner with fresh garlic bread (there's a really easy recipe here) and a cucumber salad. Mmmm, so good!

Have fun making some for your family :)

PS. Check out the Wholesome Whole Foods and Food Renegade weekly link up for more great recipes and articles :)

~ Rosina