For those of you who know her, or know her from the comments, this week is Liz's birthday. So I decided to take the opportunity to try out something we'd been building slowly toward all week - homemade squash and goat cheeze ravioli.

Cathy loves squash, and had bought a butternut recently for purposes unknown. We also had two of an odd, smaller squash from the last of the CSA in the fridge. So during the week, she roasted them off in the oven with nothing but oil, scooped out the flesh, and stored it in the fridge.

She had a recipe for butternut squash ravioli with ricotta, but I'm not a big fan of ricotta, and I had a log of chevre from Costco in the fridge, so I decided to use that for a more interesting flavor. It came out very nice, so here's the recipe:

• 1.5 pounds mixed roasted squash
• 8 ounces goat cheese, at room temperature
• Half an onion
• 4 medium garlic cloves
• 1 tablespoon butter
• Salt and pepper to taste

That's it. I put the squash and the goat cheese in the food processor. I minced the onion and crushed the garlic. Sauteed the onion in the butter until it was lightly caramelized, then added the garlic and cooked for another 2 minutes or so.

Everything went into the work bowl of the food processor and got blended until it turned into a consistent filling.

Then we made fresh pasta. I don't do this often, on account of it being a pain in the ass. I'm not providing a recipe, because fresh pasta is wildly variable - the recipe we used didn't have nearly enough moisture, possibly because, out of necessity, we used 1/3 whole wheat flour. But the pasta was eventually made, rolled out into sheets, dolloped with heaping teaspoons of the filling, egg washed, and sealed. Mostly by Cathy, because I was working on some other stuff, like the appetizer.

I had the Hell's Ketchup, so I decided to make a quick appetizer sized portion of roasted potatoes. I got a large bag of mixed baby purple, tiny red, and fingerling potatoes last time I was at Costco, so I just halved and roasted them off as I've done dozens of times since I started FB. But since there isn't a picture of the ketchup...

Back to the main course. I decided on a loose white-wine butter sauce to go with this, but I wanted a sharp component. I was thinking capers, but I don't work with capers and don't have any on hand. So Cathy suggested the last of the pickled peppers in a fine dice. I failed to measure the sauce, but it basically involved sauteeing onion, garlic, lemon zest, the minced peppers, and some dried parsley in butter, then adding about a cup of white wine, reducing for a bit, and mounting with another 3-4 tablespoons of butter. Which was for about 5-6 servings, so it wasn't super-rich. The ravioli was just popped into boiling water for about 3 minutes - everything in the filling was already cooked, so it just needed to come up to temperature and cook the pasta.

A note on quantities. About 2/3 of the filling made at least 60 ravioli. So you don't have to make nearly as much filling as I did. Making ravioli takes a lot of time. Hours. Especially if you don't do it all the time and the filling is very sticky.

I served this with a simple side salad. Dessert was a tres leches cake from Cafe Latte in St. Paul, which Liz brought, and is probably the single greatest cake I've ever eaten. Definitely top three.