Yesterday afternoon, I was motivated to make some pasta. I decided to use the bread hook on the Kitchenaide to make the dough (two eggs, flour, salt, water). The resulting dough was nicely mixed so it didn’t need to be run through my pasta maker as many times.

Because I have a super easy and effective ravioli maker that makes twelve at a time, I searched through my refrigerator and freezer for "something" that could be made into the filling. Two weeks ago, I had purchased a sweet potato after seeing the White House edition of Iron Chef America. Four chefs competed on two teams using the "secret" ingredient — produce from the White House organic garden.

Michelle Obama commented that she loved sweet potatoes. Yam. Sweet potato. At the time, I wondered, "weren’t they the same?"

Nope. After microwaving my lone sweet potato for ten minutes, I quickly realized what all the "ruckus" is over sweet potatoes. First, they’re not as dark as a yam and super sweet. Ah, now I understand how sweet potatoes can be turned into pie!

Wanting a more robust ravioli, I browned some onions and garlic then added two chopped chicken sausages. I buy various flavors of chicken or turkey sausages and divide them into packages of two, which I then freeze. The problem is that I don’t label the sausages so I don’t know whether I’m using a sausage that consists of chicken and apples or turkey with poblanos!

Happily, I must have selected chicken and apple sausage. The concoction looked rather… gross (right)…with competing flavors so I added Cajun seasoning. If you’re going to blow a dish, you might as well aim for total failure.

Nevertheless, I proceeded with making three dozen raviolis. Even  though I had more filling, I decided to turn the rest of the dough into wide and thin spaghetti.

After cleaning up my mess, I brought a pot of water to a boil and cooked 18 of the ravioli, which I served with a drizzle of olive oil and sprinkle of seasoning. They were SURPRISINGLY yummy! The sweet potato was a nice base for sausage.

In fact, they were so good that on Sunday morning, I made a small batch of dough and made two dozen more ravioli with the rest of the filling. I then placed the ravioli on plates in the freezer. When they were hard, I bagged them for a future dinner or two!

The spaghetti we’ll eat in the coming weeks. After it’s dry, I seal it up in bags and place in the pantry. The two bags of spaghetti are in the back. A freezer bag of frozen ravioli is in the front.