Have you ever tried making a stuffed pasta pie? Not a pasta omelet, like the typical Neapolitan one, but a pie resembling a rustic pie, a savory pie, a quiche… a stuffed pasta quiche.
Like this one:

It’s a long story. 😃 It all started a long time ago, with this clipping glued in my recipe notebook, a notebook I periodically tell you about.

The recipe notebook is a bottomless pit of old, very old recipes that belong to history by now. It contains clippings from magazines, the backs of packages, promotional leaflets, everything and more, all of which is now forgotten by everyone.

The tortellini quiche from the clipping, even though I never tried it, stayed in a corner of my mind for decades (a couple of decades), and continued to fascinate me for some mysterious reason. For years I told myself “one day or another I’ll try it”.
And about a year ago, I finally decided to try it. That is, to start trying it… because since that day I’ve repeated it in a loop at least five times. 😃

The doubt I had had until that day, that first trial, was always just one: why “ruin” good tortellini to transform them into a quiche? or pie? in short, into a mixture of stuffed pasta + cream + eggs + brisée + etcetera?
In the end, I understood. Just don’t use good tortellini. Or another good stuffed pasta.
Because the good one, meaning the homemade one, doesn’t spontaneously make us want to transform it into a pie. And because the good one, at least in my house, after going through the trouble of making it – that is, making the pasta, rolling it out, putting in the filling, closing it by hand, and in the case of tortellini and cappelletti, rolling them around your finger one by one – in short, after all that work, it’s pretty difficult to have the courage to then mess up our beautiful homemade stuffed pasta. Isn’t it the same for you too?

But… I know, you’re asking yourselves: what might be the stuffed pasta that can be defined as ‘not so good‘ suitable for this purpose?
Come on, let’s admit it. It will have happened to you too, (oh no?) (oh yes eh!), we’ve all been tempted, sooner or later, by the 3-for-2 or 2-for-1 offers at supermarkets. There you go. Those are the only occasions when I sometimes buy that pseudo (no offense eh) packaged fresh pasta like ricotta and spinach tortelloni (the ricotta ones, since I rarely buy those with meat fillings). In short, depending on the brands, the packaged stuffed pasta is sometimes decent but sometimes not, sometimes you wonder why you fell for it, and you scold yourself for having been lured by the 3-for-2.

And it happened on one of those days, that I tried making this stuffed pasta pie for the first time. After cooking tortelloni with a light green filling, most of which opened during cooking, and that, really, were not presentable on the plate, not even for us who aren’t picky eaters… It was at that moment, that I remembered my notebook, the clipping, and the never-tried tortellini quiche recipe. I had to save what I could, so I took out the brisée pastry I had in the fridge and gave it a go.

And the result, it may seem strange but it is so, surprised me. A packaged brisée + two packs of no-good packaged tortelloni + a bit of cream and a bit of cooked ham + a gratin in the oven managed to transform into a pasta pie that was worth something.

That first pasta pie was the first of a series, all “improving”. I tried a second time with another type of stuffed pasta, then on the third occasion, I introduced my homemade brisée, and that’s when I realized it could be further improved, so at that point, I took the leap: I tried with serious ricotta tortelloni, always purchased, but from fresh artisan pasta. We had indulged in them the day before, with butter and sage, as the Emilian tradition demands, and the next day there were really few left. To avoid my two children fighting over them – I’ll eat them, no I’ll eat them – I played the pasta pie card.
The novelty this time was the addition of potatoes: the brilliant idea to add potatoes to fill the empty spaces, due to the few available tortelloni, was my daughter’s idea: a winning idea.
This Flavia of ours, quietly, I really have to admit, she has the knack for cooking! 😍

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