So I was lucky enough to be visited by the lovely Lal and I decided I’d have to whip up something pretty special for supper. Pasta I thought – how hard can it be? Quite hard it turns out and so the pasta very much became a team effort with overall pleasing results.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/butternut_squash_ravioli_31141

We made the Hairy Biker’s Butternut Squash ravioli and it was so tasty. The recipe is a bit fussy so we made a few amendments.

Top tips:

1) 500g of butternut squash is a piddly small amount. The average butternut squash it turns out has a fighting weight of about 1.3kg so if you are going to cook for people with an appetite, just weigh your butternut squash and scale up the amount of pasta dough to suit.

2) If you are going to make your pasta in a blender (which is a good idea) then do use the dough hook attachment and not the cutting attachment. If you use the cutting attachment you may find that you break your Mum’s Magimix – Sorry Mum and thank heaven for the 3 year guarantee.

3) I couldn’t really understand what the hairy bikers were talking about when they talked about ‘marking circles in the dough without cutting’ and ‘lifting sheets on sheets’. It all would have made it very complicated. Much simpler to roll dough, cut circles and repeat until there is no more dough to roll.

4) The recipe suggested garnishing your ravioli with sundried tomatoes and sage. We decided that bacon lardons were much better.

5) The hairy bikers did not make a sauce for their ravioli and it would have been very dry without sauce. We had quite a lot of extra butternut squash filling left after we had filled the pasta so I put the butternut squash filling into a saucepan, warmed through, and added chicken stock until it reached a saucy consistency. It was great.