Ravioli, Pasta, Sauce, and Meatballs from scratch!

Set the mood with Italian wine and Italian CDs!

Then, find yourself some willing kids and have them make pounds of meatballs! (Warn them to keep it away from mom's nearby laptop!)

It helps to coerce them with promises of a taste-tester once they're done baking!

Meanwhile, on your great-grandmother's dough board, put 2 1/4 cups of flour and form a well in the center.

Next, crack 3 eggs carefully into the center, taking care to not let them flow out of the well like a lava pouring volcano. (Sometimes a second pair of hands supporting the flour wall helps.)

Take a fork and slowly start beating the eggs into the well. Once they're beaten, carefully incorporate some of the flour of the walls into the mixture until the eggs are more of a batter and no longer runny.

Next, using both hands in a quick fold-and-flop kind of motion, take the outside walls of remaining flour and cover the eggs in the well and start kneading to mix the rest of the flour with the eggs. It'll be sticky, but once it's incorporated, wrap it in plastic and let it sit for a few minutes.

Have a younger cousin make the ricotta cheese filling for the ravioli! (It helps if she wears an apron you gave to your brother as a gift years ago that reads "I don't need a recipe... I'm Italian!")

After the dough has sat, it's texture will have completely changed. Knead it on a lightly floured surface and then, depending on if you have a pasta machine, you can half the ball to go through the machine, or roll the dough out and cut it by hand.

We had a pasta machine, so we rolled it through the flattener part, it goes through 7 times, once on each setting until it's a long, flat sheet of thin pasta.

Working pretty quickly, as the dough dries out and becomes prone to cracking, lay it over your great-grandmother's ravioli mold and press lightly with the well-maker.

Spoon the cheese filling into the wells and cover with another sheet of pasta. Roll a rolling pin over the mold and the pasta will easily pull from the sides

This will leave you with two rows of neat raviolis to separate and lay on a floured pan.

When you're exhausted from hurrying through batches of ravioli, it's ok to switch to spaghetti! Simply transfer that long, flat sheet of pasta into the spaghetti slot of the pasta machine and crank the handle!


Cut with scissors when it gets too long and hang on a drying rack (or spare laundry rack!)

Finally, after two hours of work, you can boil the ravioli and pasta, and have heaps and heaps of home-made Italian food!

Enough for dinner that night and four freezer containers for later! (I took home two, one of pasta and one of ravioli, both with sauce and meatballs!)

Mmm, all that hard work just makes it taste that much better!


And .... Happy Birthday to Johnny today!!!