Spinach Ravioli with Sun-Dried Tomatoes, Bocconcini, Basil and Prosciutto

I've been making fresh pasta for a few years now.  It takes two or three attempts to get really comfortable with the process, but after that its a breeze.  And there is nothing better than fresh pasta - whether its fettucine, lasagne, ravioli or any of the other wide variety of options.

This time I adjusted the quantity of pasta dough as I was just cooking for me and I decided to make green pasta!

At its core, pasta dough is the simplest recipe - flour and water or some other liquid.  Many recipes use whole eggs to give the pasta a more silky texture or just egg yolks for a richer taste.

There are all sorts of ingredients you can add to give the pasta colour or design - black pepper, herbs or beet juice for example.  The main thing to keep in mind is that if you are adding a wet ingredient (spinach, beet juice), make sure you leave out an equivalent amount of the egg so that the resulting mixture has the same ratio of wet to dry.  I replaced a couple of the eggs with blanched and drained fresh spinach to give the pasta a vibrant green hue.

• 1 3/4 - 2 cups flour (preferably tipo '00' flour which is finer and easier to work with)
• 1 whole organic egg
• 5 - 6 oz spinach (blanched for 2 - 3 minutes, well drained and then run through a food processor)

Kneed the dough by hand for 4 or 5 minutes until the dough has a silky, smooth and slightly elastic texture.  Wrap it in cling wrap and pop it in the fridge for an hour.  After the dough has sat, cut it into fourths, and work with a quarter of the dough at a time.

I typically put it through the pasta machine on the thickest setting four or five times, folding the ends of the pasta sheet into the middle after each attempt.  Then, adjust the thickness setting down from 7 to 6, and run the pasta sheet again, repeating this and lowering the setting each time until you've run it through the thinnest 1 setting.  Its a smart idea to keep extra flour on the work surface and to dust the pasta sheet regularly so that it remains easy to work with.

Ravioli is easy to make from here because all you need to do is place one sheet on your work surface, add your filling at evenly spaced intervals along the pasta sheet and then cover with another pasta sheet.  Make sure that there are no air pockets within the filling, and then cut them into individual raviolis.  Because the pasta is fresh, it should only take 3 or 4 minutes in boiling water to cook.

For the filling you can start with something simple like spinach and ricotta or mint and buffalo mozzarella.  For this attempt I adapted a Jamie Oliver recipe and used sun-dried tomatoes, bocconcini, basil and parmesan wrapped in a small prosciutto slice.