Chicken and Mozzarella Ravioli

February 4, 2020

As I hope is reflected in my cookbooks, I truly enjoy cooking!  In addition, I really enjoy inventing new dishes and menus.  A problem I’ve encountered in the time since the passing of my wife, Susan, is that of cooking too much food for one person!  Part of the problem, I must confess, is that I’m not a big fan of leftovers – even when they’re delicious!

Slowly but surely, I’ve been working to combat ending up with too much food by packaging things I bring home from the store into one person-sized baggies or food saver packages, then cutting recipe measurements appropriately when I cook.  Sometimes, that’s challenging because the store-bought packages are frozen, and the food shouldn’t be re-frozen after it’s thawed to portion out.  Oh, well, we can only do our best and enjoy the results when they work!

One such product I buy fairly often when I don’t feel like making it myself is ravioli.  Chicken and cheese, mushroom and cheese, lobster, sausage – I could go on and on!  Lots of excellent varieties can be found in both your local grocery stores and in ‘big box’ outlets such as Costco, Sam’s Club, BJ’s, and others.  Usually, even at the local grocery, the available packages are for two people; at the big box stores, they’re usually packaged for multiple meals.  So what’s a single person person to do?  Divide up the contents into meal-sized packages and freeze what you’re not going to use in the next two or three days.  If you package for one person and have a guest (or multiple guests), it’s easy to grab and thaw as many individual packages as you need.

Yesterday, I got a wild idea that I wanted to have chicken and mozzarella ravioli, but as dinner time neared, I decided that I wanted to make something I’d not tried before.  Luckily, I have a number of cookbooks on my kitchen shelf to help stir my creative juices, and one of those is Williams and Sonoma’s “Pasta.”  Viola!  A quick check of the index pointed me to a few ravioli with sauce recipes that looked delicious and reasonably quick and easy to make.  After looking them over, I settled on a sage cream sauce the book paired with ground turkey ravioli.  I had chicken and mozzarella ravioli, so I decided that the combination was close enough!

One thing I’ve noticed about many cookbooks, particularly by chefs who have spent their lives in large-staffed restaurants and by companies selling their goods through their cookbooks is that using MULTIPLE pots and pans for a single recipe isn’t a big deal to them.  Well, if you’re like me, you don’t have a staff to clean up all those pots and pans, stove tops and utensils once you’re done!  The sage cream sauce in the Williams and Sonoma book was, in my personal opinion, an example of overkill with kitchenware:  warm this in a small pan then transfer it to a larger pan; saute that until reduced, then strain it into a third pan; cook the ravioli in a fourth pan, then pour it into a colander before mixing everything together in a serving bowl before transferring individual servings onto plates.  Really!  It would have taken me a half hour to clean up after I finished!

So what did I do to simplify the process while making a delicious meal?  I prepared the sage cream sauce in a single saute pan by using ground sage from my garden and foregoing the straining.  Diced shallot pieces and sage ‘dust’ in a sauce is not a reason to use two extra pans!  And when the ravioli was done, I transferred it directly into the saute pan using the slotted spoon with which I made the sage cream sauce, then to my plate with the same spoon.  Ta dah!  A pot and a pan, plus a slotted spoon and the dinner plate and fork.  I promise you that the results were every bit as delicious (and perhaps a little quicker and easier) than if I had followed the recipe precisely!  I also determined that while the recipe’s call for heavy cream and no pepper, it was definitely excellent with fat-free half and half and coarsely ground black pepper.

So, the message, my friends, is to play in the kitchen whenever you can, and adjust what you buy and cook based on your personal circumstances.  If you don’t have venison available, lamb, goat or pork tenderloin are usually very acceptable substitutes (just adjust temperatures and cooking times as needed).  If you don’t have a wild salmon or steelhead, farm-raised works fine. 

My bottom line is to have fun.  Experiment.  Enjoy the adventure and eat what you ‘harvest!’