ravioli with fat free arugula cream sauce

bob is a food voyeur. keeps reading all these restaurant reviews, and philly is a pretty good restaurant town so they keep on coming. always something new. sometimes he even gets to try some out. but mostly they remain a distant dream. ravioli with arugula cream sauce, just a phrase in passing in some review, who knows what food destination. no clue what it might be. but it stuck in bob's mind. unusual since his memory is not one of his strong points. absent minded professor image to live up to. not hard for bob to do.

anyway, the fridge is usually stocked with at least one package of exotic stuffed ravioli from the local authentic Italian family food source. with a backup version from Trader Joe's in the pantry not requiring refrigeration, for when the Carlino supply is temporarily out.

a little spice package of arugula gets grabbed at the supermarket. an already opened pint container of fat free half and half waiting in the fridge. fat free half and half—seemed too good to be true when bob spotted it by chance the week before. and no recognizably dangerous ingredients listed on the container. seemed okay for the first pasta sauce application. why not arugula cream?

so what might arugula cream be? never hurts to consult the cookbook library. for any kind of cream sauce with green leafy things pulverized together. nope. so... what to do. well, arugula pesto is lots of pulverized arugula with some pine nuts, parmigiano and a little garlic thrown into the mix. and we put freshly ground black pepper on practically every dish of pasta we chow down. sounds like the lineup we can use for the cream sauce, light on arugula since we only had 2/3 oz, which might have been like a half a cup of whole leaves if you didn't press them to the bottom. half a cup of fat free half and half. turn on the blender. already done. hmm.

ingredients

1 lb high quality stuffed ravioli
1/2 c fat free half and half (substitutable by any cream product of any fat content)
2/3 oz arugula, maybe 1/4 c loosely packed if you imagine it already chopped up a bit
2–3 T freshly grated parmigiano
1 garlic clove
a hit of freshly ground black pepper

instructions

  1. Start the pasta water boiling and cook the ravioli (with salt, how much is never clear to bob, he just dumps some in) as directed until al dente.
  2. Meanwhile dump all the other ingredients into the blender and blend until smooth.
  3. Pour into your 4 qt nonstick chef's pan or equivalent and put on minimum heat for just long enough to warm the cream a bit.
  4. Drain the ravioli and dump into the cream sauce. The heat from the recently boiling ravioli will finish the job on the sauce.
  5. Serve immediately.

notes

  1. The sauce has a lovely light green color. And no accompanying fat laden cream guilt baggage. But if you can't find the guilt free stuff, remember it's only half a cup, divided in two or three servings depending on how hungry you are, go with light cream and sleep easy.
  2. Not bad for such a quick improvisation. We'll do this again.
aruglacrm.htm: 16-aug-2006 [what, ME cook? © 1984 dr bob enterprises]