Stocking up - Part two

So after making a stash of carrot cake, malt loaf and oat cakes to see us through the week, I thought I would have a go at making cheese.

 Making a soft cheese is really very simple, you just take milk (I used 4 pints), heat it to 32 degrees and then add rennet according to the instructions on the packet and leave it to set. After several hours it will look like this :

Chop it into cubes and heat again to 32 degrees. This will encourage the whey to drain from the curds. It can then be turned into a muslin lined sieve to drain.

Once it has drained to the desired consistency turn it into a bowl and add salt and any herbs to taste. A little milk or cream may be added now as well.
So I had my cottage cheese, but what to do with it? One answer was to use it as a filling for ravioli so naturally I had to make pasta then. I made it by mixing 6 eggs into 600g of white bread flour and attempting to form it into a dough. My mixture however was incredibly dry and didn't want to stick together so I instead of adding more egg, I cheated by adding a little water. This seemed to do the trick although compared with bread making the dough still seemed very hard to knead. Eventually I had a lump which looked like this:

  Taking approximately a quarter of this dough I rolled it out until it was thin enough to force it through the rollers of the pasta maker, like so:

Then I kept on passing it through the rollers, moving them closer together each time until the above lump of dough had been rolled so thin, I had been forced to cut it in half and turn it into two pieces like so:

I then did the same with the remainder of the dough. Although I was going to make ravioli, I had far more dough than I needed so I used one third to make spaghetti and another to make tagliatelle:

These have both gone in the freezer for another day. Cost for all the pasta about 54p.
The ravioli I wanted to make was this recipe by the Hairy Bikers http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/ricotta_ravioli_with_a_25270 for Ricotta Ravioli with Soft Egg Yolk, Brown Butter and Pan Grattata. Obviously I was using my own home made cheese instead of ricotta. Translated the recipe called for large ravioli parcels to be filled with a ricotta and parmesan mixture and then have an egg yolk placed gently on top of the cheese like so

 and covered with the top sheet of pasta. This is then poached in simmering water for two minutes to give you a lightly poached egg inside ravioli.It is finished off by being  topped with garlic breadcrumbs and melted butter poured over. Here is the finished article after I cut into the egg to show off the glorious golden yolk of our eggs.