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This post is about some delicious butternut squash ravioli, and the puzzles and pains of recipe interpretation that led to its being.

It’s been a good year for butternut squash in my CSA, so I’ve been eating it before the cold weather arrives (when I typically would use it in soups). I ate the first one as a simple dish, essentially squash baked with melted cheese on top, inspired by Leland‘s dinner (which I couldn’t duplicate because I didn’t have cottage cheese.) It was quite delicious, if I do say, but too humble for show.

Butternut Squash Ravioli with Hazelnut Brown Butter Sauce was my second outing, shared with friends. I selected the recipe, went to the store to buy the missing ingredients (hazelnuts, sage, and wonton wrappers), and thus began the interpretations.

And now some griping. I’ve written literally hundreds of recipes—rewrites, mostly, of sometimes detailed and sometimes highly sketchy recipes from home cooks—but I have not developed too many recipes. Still, I have to wonder about the editors at Gourmet, where the recipe linked above was published and which is the basis for the version I used, which is in the Gourmet Cookbook. My gripes involve these specified ingredients:

• Ground sage. Ground sage? Rubbed sage. Sage powder. Sage leaves. But ground? As I stood looking at the jars of bulk herbs at the Community Mercantile, I noted the buyers there evidently didn’t know ground sage, either. I opted for the rubbed sage, figuring it probably had more sage character than the powdered variety. (I have found the term “ground sage,” however, elsewhere since the other day, but it still rubs me wrong. I suspect it’s the powdered variety, so my ravioli probably weren’t as sagey as intended.)
• Won ton wrappers. OK, I am most definitely not a won ton maker, so when the Merc didn’t have won ton wrappers but did have egg roll wrappers, I figured they ought to be the same thing, but they seemed awfully big. You’ll note that the recipe says 60 wrappers but doesn’t say how big they are or how much the total weighs. I opted for the 1-pound, 20-count package of egg roll wrappers. No way was I buying 60 of these 5-inch square sheets. I was going to use a 1 1/2 pound squash (versus the 2 pounder specified), and I figured I could get at least two ravioli per sheet.
• Aged goat cheese. Like there’s only one kind? The book suggested a brand, but not a variety. Many aged goat cheese seem to be blues. I happened to have some goat cheese cheddar in the refrigerator, so I used that. Sheesh. (And did I mention I live in Kansas? If we have multiple aged goat cheeses to choose from here, what about in someplace like New York? Sheesh!)

Anyway, back in the kitchen. I baked the squash, mashed it, mixed it with sauteed onions, garlic (not in the recipe version above) and sage, and proceeded with assembly. Voila, filling on a triangle of egg roll wrapper. I figured it would be an easy fold-over-and-seal this way:

In fact, it was easy to fold over and seal. But there was tons of excess dough. So I tried another folding method, in which the dough winds up looking like a little square envelope after using a folding method rather like folding a baby into a (cloth) diaper. That didn’t seem quite right, either, so I amused myself making assort ravioli shapes and sizes:

I decided, late in the process, that the optimal shape was a little pouch, sort of like a dumpling, made from a square that was one-quarter of an egg roll sheet:

(Picture looks a little weird because it’s a detail from bigger pic.)

Toasted hazelnuts, browned butter, and cooked ravioli later, we had the final dish:

I’m not sure whether that looks like something you’d want to eat. You tell me. Presentation, alas, is not my strong suit.

Fortunately, my friends are good sports as well as good friends and food lovers, so they weren’t put off by the appearance. And, it turned out, the ravioli were quite good. Another friend tried one as a leftover. All deemed the recipe a keeper, although I have no idea whether it’s anything like what the Gourmet writers and editors intended.

Let me know if you want me to write up the recipe the way I made it. I’ll try to be a little more specific than the original recipe writers. For my next butternut dish, I’m doing soup.