ravioli with sage butter cream sauce

While ani was at Trader Joe's picking up the jar of chestnuts for soup, she grabbed a bag of little squash-filled half-moon ravioli for $2.49. Either a good price or a mistaken purchase ("how can such cheap filled-pasta be good?" was the thought). bob was leaning toward the latter conclusion before sampling them with this inspired sauce.

We keep the fresh sage leaves in the freezer. So we can't use our fancy French style herb shredder from Williams and Sonoma on them since the herbs have to be absolutely dry, but that's a different story. [On our first trial run of the shredder we made the mistake of washing the target herb first and spinning "dry", but the result was very disappointing. But later it worked great on dry herbs. Although most dry herbs one buys are already suitably subdivided...] So our sage leaves have to be cut up with a knife.

We started with the oil and butter and garlic and sage and then just improvised. Ani suggested the red pepper and cream and normally skeptical bob said "why not?"

ingredients

1 lb authentic looking ravioli

2 T olive oil

3 T unsalted butter

6 sage leaves, finely chopped

1 garlic clove, pressed

1/8 t middle eastern red pepper (optional)

freshly ground black pepper to taste

freshly grated parmigiano to taste (1-2 T)

3/4 half pint light cream (3/4 c?) or half and half

instructions

1. Start pasta water boiling and dump in salt and pasta when boiling. Cook al dente.
2. Meanwhile, chp the fresh sage leaves and heat the oil and butter in a large enough nonstick pot to hold drained pasta (4 qt chef's pan).
3. Saute briefly the sage and pressed garlic, just to infuse the garlic tast into the butter/oil without browning the garlic.
4. Add in the remaining ingredients and warm up, then turn off heat.
5. Combine with the pasta in the pan and serve with additional freshly grated pepper and parmigiano.

notes

1. Maybe one can do a leaner version of this by omitting the cream and increasing the oil/butter a bit.