I was up at 5:15AM and got the post up. Then I changed over the laundry and cleaned the kitchen. I had to sit down after that and got up at 7:30AM to start setting up for making the zucchini ravioli. I closed the house up against the heat and went out to harvest 2 bulbs of garlic and lots of basil leaves. My #2 intern arrived at 8AM and helped me harvest the basil.
She got the garlic pressed while I figured out how to do the zucchini on the finger remover mandolin. The safe mandolin (shown above) would not work for this application.
I skinned off some of the skin, then made very thin strips of zucchini, thin as tissue paper, just enough to hold together. She moved onto making the filling.
Once I’d figured that out, she started making the strips and I sat and tore basil leaves.
The strips were laid out on paper towels and lightly sprinkled with sea salt to draw out water. Then they were covered with paper towels that were pressed down and left for 5 minutes or so.
I made another batch of sauce to cover the ravioli. I made 5 batches of sauce over all.
Then we peeled the strips off and placed them in alternating layers on a plate. We laid 2 or 3 of the strips down, and then put 2 or 3 strips across the middle, forming a cross.
As you can see we put a batch of sauce on the bottom of the pan first. It took a whole batch to cover the 16” x 11” pan.
Next we put a tablespoon or so in the center of the cross and folded the legs up clockwise to form a tight package. We made 3 batches of the filling.
Ingredients for both sauce and filling
First pan done, except for mozzarella which was thawing out
She managed to get all the zucchinis sliced up and salted before she had to go. I finished loading the pans.
There were 4 raviolis left over and lots of filling, so I put them in a small casserole and covered them with sauce, basil leaves and mozzarella.
The 2 big pans went into the big oven. It doesn’t have good temperature control and when I checked it, it had gotten up to 500F. I turned it way down but the mozzarella had browned.
The little pan went into the convection oven and I forgot it and it was in there too long and its mozzarella had browned.
They were both in the ovens, which were supposed to be 350F, for about 40 minutes.
But they came out fine in the end and were really, really delicious. I ended up eating the entire small casserole for lunch!
Once they had cooled off, I put 6 raviolis and some sauce in each storage container and got 8 more meals.
I got the kitchen sort of cleaned up but I was too tired to stand and do dishes. I spoke with the home help place and they were going to find out if they got the authorization they were promised for Wednesday morning. I never got a call back, so I don’t know what happened.
I ended up taking an hour and a half nap in the late afternoon. When I got up a storm was rolling in.
The storm on Tuesday apparently got bad in our town, but I didn’t see anything here on the farm. The storm that was rolling in looked much more severe than Tuesday’s had, so I got the house closed up and ready, but it wasn’t that bad, fun to watch though.
On Thursday I plan to be out in the Big garden by 6AM to tie up tomatoes, check the garlic and broccoli, and do some weeding. I also have to get into the Small garden and harvest more zucchini and summer squash. I should also clean out whatever peas are out there and process them.
It’s not supposed to be as hot and humid, only in the mid 80’s so we’ll see how long I last out there. No helpers coming.