Allison's Wonderland

Food. Wine. More Food. More Wine. Mangia. Mangia. MANGIA!!

I had an unusual experience this morning I probably won't ever be doing again in my life. Needless to say it was fun. I woke up at about 8:30 and headed downstairs to Lala's house. Lala is Mattia's Great Aunt. She told me her real name, but I forgot already. Lala only speaks Italian, so we didn't have a whole lot to talk about. :) My job today was to help make ravioli. If you don't know what that is, which every person probably should, its pasta filled with meat, cheese, veggies, etc. I have never made my own pasta before so this was pretty cool.

Lala had mixed up the filling the night before so it was ready to go. The pasta was sitting in a big blog on the table. At first I just watched. It was fascinating to me. I normally just buy pasta from the grocery store, boil it up and eat it. Pretty easy. This was a process. She cut the pasta, which looked like bread dough, into smaller blobs instead of one big one. Then she cut the smaller blogs into even smaller ones. After that was done, she would put the pasta into this thing that reminded me of a ringer washer. My Grandma use to have one and I liked to watch the clothes go through and get really flat. Essentially this is what Lala was doing with the pasta. She would run each piece through about 4 or 5 times in order to get it super flat. Then she would sprinkle flour on the table and get globs of the filling on a spoon. She would spoon it out on in a little line and then fold the pasta over on itself.

This was my favorite part. You had to take the pasta cutter and cut the excess off. This is the reason why ravioli always has the jagged edges. Then Lala would pass the little line of pasta blobs to her husband who then cut them into the ravioli shaped pieces. He put them in a container and once it was full would carry them down to the freezer. We spent about three hours doing this, and we weren't even half way through! CRAZY! The excess dough that we would cut off wasn't able to be used again for ravioli as it got too dry, so we would change the contraption on the ringer washer thing to make thin pieces of pasta instead of flattening it.

It was so fun! That night Lala invited us over for dinner and we got to eat the fruits of our labor! Haha! Not the ravioli because that will be eaten for Christmas dinner, but we ate the spaghetti. Its a wonder why Italians are not huge and fat because they eat kind of a lot. For dinner we had spaghetti in Bolognese sauce, meatballs, spinach, lots and lots of bread and Grassini, ham, mozzarella cheese balls and then for dessert there was Panettone (fruit cake type thing), and my favorite, different cheeses like Brie with homemade marmalade. OUT OF THIS WORLD!! I felt so fat! They also go against the American mantra of do not eat after 8 p.m. Dinner starts at 8 so, like I said. They should all be huge!!!

Pasta Recipe - This feeds A LOT OF PEOPLE - Pasta for about 3 months. :)

1 Kilo Flour
9 Eggs
2 Tbls. Olive Oil
Pinch of Salt

Mix Together
Roll in flour like you would bread (Just like bread dough)
Put it in the pasta machine and flatten. :)

Filling - Whatever you want! This one was beef and pork, spinach and cabbage