Tortellini!

I was longing for tortellini for quite some time and I know that DS produces frozen gluten-free tortellini. Every time I went to a supermarket where they offer products from DS I rushed to the frozen food section. And every time the same disappointment: no tortellini! They had fish fingers and ravioli but just no tortellini. I hope nobody noticed me shouting madly at the freezer...

Well, what to do about it? I was longing for tortellini and apparently I wasn’t supposed to get them at the supermarket. I had to make some by myself.

So far I’ve only made my own pasta dough once and I wasn’t really happy about the dough. When I tried to roll the dough really thin, it just broke apart. Luckily, Carrie from Ginger Lemon Girl put my attention to Gluten Free Sox’s recipe for pasta dough (Thanks for the tip!). I used brown millet flour instead of the cornstarch but I think I’ll try something else next time. The taste of the brown millet was just too distinctive. But it was still really good! And oh my god the filling! The filling was so good that we really had to restrict ourselves not to eat it completely plain. (We used the leftovers as pizza topping the next day and added some feta cheese. I simply love cheese if you haven’t figured it out by yourself yet. My boyfriend is always kidding I have pasta and sauce with my parmesan cheese.)

I planned to have a simple tomato sauce with the tortellini. When I read the recipe for 15-Minute Tomato Sauce from chez pim I just had to try it. I was always too intimidated to try my own tomato sauce from scratch. But this recipe sounded really good. So I bought some tomatoes and actually did my first tomato sauce from actual tomatoes! My boyfriend thought that it tasted too much like tomatoes (he doesn’t like tomatoes) so I reckon the sauce was fine. If you haven’t tried your own tomato sauce from scratch you should really try Pim's recipe!

So I managed the pasta dough, the filling and the sauce. The only problem left was how to form tortellini! It took me a while to figure it out and we probably had little pasta parcels rather than tortellini. But who cares? I finally had my tortellini.

Ricotta-spinach tortellini with self-made tomato sauce


For the pasta dough follow gluten free sox’s recipe. I put the pasta dough in the fridge and let it rest while I prepared the tomato sauce.

For the filling:
1 cup ricotta cheese
200g spinach
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
1 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
2 tablespoons freshly grated parmesan cheese

Combine ricotta and parmesan and season with salt and pepper. Heat olive oil and garlic in a frying pan and add the spinach. Season with nutmeg. Sauté until the spinach has fallen. Remove the spinach from the pan and chop it roughly. Add to the ricotta mixture and mix well.

Roll the pasta dough really thin or use a pasta machine if you have one at hand. Cut the dough into quarters (about 5cm²) and put one teaspoon of filling in the middle of each quarter. Wet the rest of the dough with water or egg yolk to make it sticky. Carefully cover the filling with one corner of the dough and roll it over. Stick the remaining ends together.
Bring water in a cooking pot to boil and add some salt. Gently add the tortellini and cook until the tortellini swim on the surface. Serves two (if you are really hungry). Enjoy.