Every Christmas and every Easter, I make ravioli from scratch, as my great-grandmother did. Gram was from the tiny village of Pietransieri, in the Abruzzo region of Italy. Her ravioli are stuffed with cheese (ricotta, parm, romano, egg and parsley.) I grew up eating those ravioli and only those ravioli. Cheese or Bust! [I tried, once or twice, ravs filled with meat and never liked them, but have had more success in recent years with meat filled ravioli, in Rome and in Buenos Aires.] And so, I grew up making Gram's ravioli with my grandmother and when she died a few years ago, the tradition passed directly to me.
Working in my own kitchen with all day (or several days) to prep, I decided to experiment. While I always make a batch of Gram's cheese filled ravioli (
recipe here), in the last few years I have also made: ravioli stuffed with pear and mascarpone cheese, ravioli stuffed with chicken livers and swiss chard, and ravioli stuffed with mushrooms (
recipe here.) All were delicious, by the way.
This Christmas, I got La Cucina, the ultimate compendium of all the foods from that glorious geographical boot known as Italy. The recipes contained therein are for cooks who know their way around the kitchen. They don't give very specific instructions. Or maybe it only seems that way because some of the recipes in this 2,000 page collection are so basic and simple or maybe they're just guidelines, realizing that food varies not only from region to region but from kitchen to kitchen.
Thus armed with an idea more than instructions, I set to work to make ravioli filled with swiss chard and potatoes. They were such a smashing success this Christmas, I've decided to bring them back for an Easter encore.
