Ramp Ravioli with One-Hour Calamari

This pasta is a spring showpiece that hinges on finding ramps, the wild leeks that pop up for just a few weeks each April across the eastern North American forest floor. Their garlic-onion flavor is more delicate than scallion and sharper than chives, and they thrive when briefly grilled to pick up a smoky edge before being chopped and folded with fresh Roma tomatoes, black pepper, and salt into a ravioli filling.

The one-hour calamari is the quiet star. Squid cooks for exactly two windows: under a minute, or more than thirty. Anywhere in between and you get rubber. Here, calamari goes into a pan of olive oil and simmers low for an hour until the flesh turns tender enough to cut with the side of a fork. Chives brighten the oil, and the hot calamari gets tossed with just-cooked ravioli to coat every fold.

Thin pasta sheets rolled to the last setting, folded triangle-style, boiled briefly, and plated immediately while the calamari oil is still warm. Spring on a plate.

Pro Tips

• Grill ramps hot and fast, about 1 minute total. They wilt and smoke quickly, and any longer turns them limp and bitter.
• Roll the pasta to the thinnest setting on your machine. Thick pasta overpowers the delicate ramp filling.
• Use squid ink pasta dough for the traditional seafood-pasta look, or standard egg pasta if that is what you have.
• For the calamari, keep the oil at the barest simmer. A rolling simmer toughens squid; a bare one confits it gently.
• Toss the ravioli and calamari quickly once drained. Waiting longer than a minute lets the pasta dry out and the temperatures equalize.

Variations

• Swap ramps for a mix of scallion greens and young garlic when ramp season has passed.
• Use shrimp or bay scallops in place of calamari for a different shellfish pairing.
• Add a squeeze of lemon and a few shavings of lemon zest at the end for citrus brightness.