ravioli time

Other families might carve pumpkins or go to harvest festivals or search for just the right turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, but in our family when November rolls around we make homemade ravioli -- but not the kind where you crank out enough for dinner from a little pasta-making machine. We work in the thousands.

It's all in the hands.



We are siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandchildren, and an ever-changing array of visitors, working in an assembly line Henry Ford could never have envisioned, moving from table to table kneading, rolling, spreading, pressing, cutting, flouring, and packing into boxes anywhere between 3,000 and 6,000 ravioli at a time. Only those who have graduated to rolling status are allowed to roll the large sheets of dough onto which the spinach/beef filling must be spread with a precise thickness that becomes a yearly topic of conversation or argument, depending on one's perspective and level of involvement.

Eight year olds work alongside eighty year olds, the latter passing the magic touch onto the former.

And it's all in the hands.