Fresh pasta dough for cheese and mushroom ravioli

Pasta dough work station.

I found a pasta maker at TJ Maxx for $16 and I had to buy it. It rolls out dough to 6 different thicknesses and does 2 different cuts (fettuccine and angel hair). I've always wanted to make fresh pasta because it's one of my favorite foods. I used this recipe for the cheese ravioli. Although by the end of it, I had no energy to make the fresh tomato sauce so I used Trader Joe's basil marinara.

The dough, resting.

Some of the comments mentioned that it was bland so I added some white mushrooms and a lot of fresh herbs (thyme, rosemary, chives) and extra garlic. I didn't think that this would make so many ravioli, but it did. AND I had leftover dough so I made pasta. This made several meals.

Trying to place small amounts of filling on the pasta. I should've put half of what I thought would fit (based on the width of the pasta that I rolled out).

Covering the filling.

Sliced (with a pizza cutter) with the air pinched out.

I was going to shape them nicely into squares, but then realized I put way too much filling in so I kept the large ravioli as is. (Note the enormous ravioli at the bottom of the photo.)

My large, irregularly shaped pasta.

I used leftover dough to make pasta when I ran out of the ravioli filling.

Oof, these were hard to pull apart the next day- definitely go heavy with the olive oil if you are making enough for leftovers. The taste is completely different from boxed pasta. It's really silky (and I used all purpose flour! It's probably even better with european 00 flour, it's ultra ultra fine) and very egg-y. So eggy that it was almost like egg pasta. This is not an everyday recipe. It took awhile to roll out each sheet and fill them, pinch all the air out and then slice them, but for a special occasion or for an empty day, very much worth the effort.

Also, you can definitely make these without a pasta roller, but I hope you have strong arms and a whole lotta time to roll out the dough.