Santonastasio Style
Pasta...homemade pasta, to be specific, is a tradition of my family from as long as I can remember. Each and every Sunday, I would wake up to the smell of fresh tomato sauce cooking on the stove and the aroma of homemade meatballs frying in the pan. Mario Lanza would be singing on the radio on the "Italian Hour." Just writing about it calls those smells and sounds to my nose and ears! :-) The best part of the meal to come though, was the homemade noodles or lasagna or ravioli that would be made fresh just after returning home from church.
The ravioli of the Santonastasio family is especially wonderful! Typically, when you order ravioli at a restaurant, you have a choice between cheese ravioli or meat ravioli. The Santanastaccio ravioli filling is a combination of freshly seasoned cheeses and meats. I have never found this duplicated anywhere else!
Even more fun in recent years has been the "family" actually all making the ravioli together. This operation is somewhat like a miniature assembly line production. My Mom cooks and then mixes the meat and the cheese, flavoring it with the spices and seasonings. The rest of us (whomever is in the house at the time) take our stations at the dining room table. One person rolls the noodles out (using the crank noodle mashine as seen above), one or two people cut the noodles into squares (for filling), and one or two people spoon the meat/cheese mixture out of the bowl and onto the noodle squares. Finally, someone gets to be the "crimper", the person who crimps the edges of the squares together to keep the mixture in the noodle squares. We make 1,000 ravioli squares at a time and anything that does not get eaten at the time, gets put into the freezer for future delectible meals! :-)
Oh...and one last ingredient is a part of this day of ravioli fun...a fine glass of red wine! :-)
