My friends Pat and Berit came for dinner Saturday. I decided to serve Cappellacci alla Zucca, a butternut squash pasta dish that literally means “ugly hats with squash” in Italian. I bit off a bit more than I could chew, though. I hadn’t made the dish for a few years and it’s been a couple of years since I have made fresh pasta so I followed the instructions from a pasta class I once took. I should have followed the instructions for making the pasta in the Il Fornaio Pasta Book with the Cappellacci alla Zucca recipe I was following. I missed the step that tells how thick to roll the dough. Because it’s going to be filled and shaped into the “ugly hats” it should be about 1/8 inch thick. I rolled the dough way too thin. This photograph shows the last pass through my KitchenAid pasta attachment. It’s probably only 1/16 of an inch thick. The dough was too thin to fill and form the hat shape. My ugly hats turned out to be very ugly, misshapen, and leaky hats. I was so disappointed in their appearance that I didn’t even bother to take a photograph of the end result. Pat and Berit were good sports and didn’t mind being served very ugly hats. And, at least the dish tasted good. The pasta dough is made from butternut squash puree instead of eggs and the ugly hats are filled with butternut squash, walnuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and nutmeg and served over a savory tomato sauce and topped with browned butter with sage.
