Ravioli with Lentils

Christmas is coming so it’s time to think about some delicious Italian Christmas recipes. I decided to start with an Italian first course. Here I show how to prepare delicious Italian ravioli that you can prepare for the Christmas lunch. The main ingredients that I used to prepare this Italian ravioli are the lentils and cotechino that is a large boiled pork sausage. Lentils and cotechino are used in all Italy. I used lentils and cotechino for the filling of ravioli and lentils and fresh cream for their dressing. The preparation of this ravioli is easy but a little bit long: the result is delicious. I the next days a will show the recipes of a delicious main course that you can serve as second course after the ravioli.


INGREDIENTS (for 6 -8 people):
500 g or 4 cups of Flour
150 g of or 1 cup Durum wheat
5 Eggs
1 Teaspoon of salt
1 Cotechino (large boiled pork sausage) of 500 g
1 Carrot
1 Celery
½ Onion
Rosemary
50 g or ½ cup of Lard
1 Glass of white wine
200 ml or 1 cup of fresh cream
3 Tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
300 g or 1 ½ cup of Lentils

PREPARATION TIME: 2 hours

COOKING TIME: 1 hour

WINE: Oltrepo Pavese (Red Wine)

PREPARATION
The day before you decide to prepare this delicious Italian recipe, place the lentils in a bowl and cover with water. Start with the preparation of the dough for ravioli. Place in a bowl the two kinds of flour, the salt and eggs.



Mix all together and work the dough for ravioli until it becomes homogeneous.



Cover the dough for ravioli with a film and let it stand for half an hour. In this way the dough it will be softer to roll out.
After this time start to roll out the dough, you can do this with the help of a rolling pin or more easily with the help of a pasta machine. Here I use the pasta machine. Start roll out the dough from the biggest thickness of the machine then little by little reduce it until you obtain a pastry of about 2 – 3 mm of thickness. Work the dough until you obtain long stripes.





Now prepare the filling and the dressing for ravioli. If you put the lentils in water the day before you don’t need to boiled them. In this case clean and peel the carrot, celery and onion. Chop them and put them together with minced lard and rosemary. Preheat the extra virgin olive oil in a large pan, when the oil is hot add the mixture of vegetables, lard and rosemary and let them brown for a few minutes.



Then add the lentils and add the wine.



Let it evaporate, add some salt and pepper according to your taste and cover with water.



Let the lentils cook for about 40 – 50 minutes or until the water is completly reduced.



In the mean time let the cotechino cook according to the instructions on the package.



When cotechino is ready, crumble it in a bowl and mix it together with 1/3 of the lentils.



This is the filling for ravioli. You will use the rest of the lentils for the dressing. In particular you have to had fresh cream to the lentils, mix them together, let them cook for a few minutes and blend them.







Now you can fill the ravioli. Put a teaspoon of the mixture of cotechino and lentils on the long stripes of pastry as shown in the picture below.



Cover with another stripes and cut the ravioli of the shape you prefer in this case I used a round shape.



Place the ravioli on a tray sprinkled with a lot of flour otherwise they attach each other.



Let salted water boil for ravioli. Cook ravioli for some minutes until they rise on the surface. Drain them with the help of a skimmer in order not to break them. Place ravioli on a plate, pour the dressing of lentils and cream of them and serve them.



BUON APPETITO!