Kitchen: Ravioli from scratch

I'm excited for this first kitchen post!  A and I made these ravioli last night for Valentines dinner.  I had been wanting to make my own pasta for a while and this seemed like a great occasion to try it out. 

This recipe is from Joy of Cooking.  I got this cookbook for Christmas and I highly recommend it. 

This is only a recipe for the pasta.  You can fill it with pretty much anything!  My filling was just ricotta, parmesan, and salt/pepper. 

Also- this recipe involves letting the pasta sit for an hour twice!  So it takes a while, just so you know that up front. 

Ingredients (there's only 4!):
2 cups of unbleached all-purpose flour
3 large eggs
1/2 tsp of salt
1 tsp of olive oil

Optional Addition: 1 cup of finely chopped basil  (I think this made all the difference to this pasta.)

Mound the flour like a hill and make then press the top down to make a well.  (I did this inside a bowl because I didn't trust myself to do it directly on the counter!)  Add the other ingredients and beat the eggs lightly with a fork to draw the flour into the wet mixture.  As the flour gets incorporated, begin to mix everything together- with your hands (just trusting JOC here!).  Blend everything so the dough starts to form.  If it's too dry, add some water, if too sticky, add some flour. 

Then knead the dough for ten minutes.  (Kneading the dough just means pushing it away from you with the heels of your hands, then folding it in half- towards you, and turning it a quarter turn.  That's what JOC says anyway!) 

After kneading, the dough should be satiny and elastic.  Divide the dough into 4 pieces and cover each lightly with plastic wrap and let it sit for 1 hour. 

Now you have to roll the dough.  Roll it on a well-floured surface.  For ravioli, the dough has to be really thin, so thin you can see your hand through it. I couldn't get mine quite that thin (we were hungry!) and it still turned out ok.  Roll it out and turn it a quarter turn after you roll a bit.  Also, flip it over once in a while too. 

Once it's thin, use a pizza cutter to cut a long strip 4 inches wide.  Lay the rest of the sheet of pasta on top of the cut strip and cut another one to match.  One one sheet of pasta, place a 1/2 tsp of your filling on the pasta.  Place the dollops of filling an inch apart down the sheet.  The 4 inch sheet of pasta is wide enough to do two lines of dollops.  Then, wet your finger with water and trace around each dollop so that the pasta is wet.  Then lay the matching sheet of pasta on top, and start pressing the sheets of pasta together, starting at one end and proceeding down to minimize the amount of air that gets trapped in the raviolis.  Once everything is pressed down, cut the raviolis with a pizza roller.  Set them on a floured cookie sheet, not touching, and let them rest for an hour, flipping them once in a while. 

Then- the easy part!  Boil some water, put the ravioli in, boil for 7 minutes, drain, and enjoy!