As sure as eggs is eggs

I think it was Julia Child who said, "The grand part of cooking is that you can eat your mistakes." At least, that sounds like something Julia Child would say, because it is about cooking and uses the adjective "grand." I once read an article alleging that she also liked to exclaim "Balls!" whenever something didn't go her way. I guess maybe the quote above was preceded by, "Balls, Simca! My souffle has fallen again!"

Anyway, I made a lot of mistakes yesterday. Recently I have been obsessed with making ravioli with egg yolks inside. Ruhlman shows a picture of the production of such ravioli, and asserts that preparing them is "very easy," which is one of those phrases that rings a little bit similar to "intuitively obvious" or "left as an exercise for the reader." So yesterday I made a bunch of pasta dough in my KitchenAid and dug in. Pictured above is the best of my three attempts from last night: kind of funky looking all around, with a slightly liquid but mostly firm yolk. Halfway there. It worked with the bed of kale that I set it on but, well, as you can see, it wasn't pretty.

But I looked at my mistakes and I grew from them and I learned, so I ended up with a pretty decent ravioli today. Protips: make really thin pasta dough so the pasta cooks much faster than the yolk, use cold yolks, seal tightly, get all the air out of the filling. I was too lazy and too monomaniacally obsessed with the ravioli to bother making any kind of accompaniment. So that's what I had for dinner tonight. Two ravioli filled with egg yolks. Then two carrots and a pear to wash the cholesterol out of my gut (this is totally how health works--I'm a chemical engineer so I know these things).

The moral of the story is that it has not been entirely fun to eat my mistakes, because I have now eaten half a dozen straight egg yolks in the past two nights. For the last of them I thought it would be a good idea to just pop the whole ravioli into my mouth and let it explode in a burst of warm eggy goodness. Above is my reaction after executing this idea.