Saturday Night: Ravioli in Beurre Noisette with Sage

This was inspired by a dish we had last time we went to La Strada. Browned butter and ravioli is another wonderful combination.

For the filling:
1 lb hot italian sausage
5 scallions, thinly sliced
3 spring garlic cloves(?), thinly sliced
1 head roasted garlic.
black pepper to taste

Brown the sausage, remove from the pan, then sautee the scallions and spring garlic briefly in a bit of the sausage fat (discard the rest). Combine all the ingredients in a bowl, mix well, and allow to cool.

For the pasta, I made a 2/3 recipe of the standard pasta dough, using semolina flour. I rolled the dough out to the second thinnest setting. To make it pretty, Andrea and I stuck sage leaves to the dough for its last couple of trips through the machine. This was gratuitous, but cute. :-) Andrea managed to get about 20 ravioli out of this quantity of dough.

To make the beurre noisette I threw a couple Tbs of butter in a pan over medium-high heat along with 10-15 sage leaves and cooked it until the butter was nice and brown and the sage leaves were crispy.

To serve, I poured the beurre noisette over the boiled and drained ravioli. (Actually, that's what I intended to do, in reality the ravioli took longer to cook than I thought so I had to put the butter on the plates first. You can't leave beurre noisette in a hot pan or it will turn into beurre noir in no time at all.)

Notes:

1. It wouldn't have hurt to start working the herbs into the dough a bit sooner.
2. It might be a good idea to roll the dough to the thinnest setting and then make the pasta by folding the dough instead of laying one sheet over the other.
3. The filling would be nicer if it held together better. To do this I think the cooked sausage and alliums should be combined with some bread crumbs and an egg, then formed into balls. I think that we can get a nice softer filling this way.