Happy New Meals

Yesterday was Jodi's birthday--happy birthday, Jodi!--and she and Ed came over for dinner. We had a nice evening lingering over the meal. I had gotten a somewhat late start cooking, so it was a frenetic burst of activity that afternoon. I could not have done it without my new K1tchenAid mixer (and kitchen assistant). I baked a chocolate cake and made this frosting that my family loves; the recipe comes from a bakery in my town where the cakes are show-stoppingly gorgeous. You can order a cake with, say, pointsettias and pine cones and pine needles, or lilies-of-the-valley and irises, and the cake decorators (who are artists) will shape these lovely, perfect flowers out of frosting. The irises will even have little petal tongues. So anyway, I didn't make any pretty flowers because I have still never gotten to take a cake-decorating class, though it is one of my life's ambitions. I did stencil some little cocoa stars on it, and called it a day.

After all, there was parmesan herb bread to bake, with beer substituted for the water to make it special. I don't even like the taste of beer, but the smell of the beer and the herbs was sensational; I practically wanted to open the breadmaker and taste it raw! I browned onion, garlic, and beef to get the pasta sauce simmering and mixed up a beef, spinach, and cheese ravioli filling. By then it was getting alarmingly late, so I was relieved when Sam came to help with the pasta-making and ravioli-stuffing.

This occasioned our first freighted disagreement--no, not politics nor past relationships nor life goals nor gender roles nor financial commitments--but rather how much meat should rightly go into each ravioli.* As the great-granddaughter of Italian immigrants from a small village outside Rome, having learned to make ravioli from my great-aunt and mother in the way my Nonna made them, I maintain that the ravioli should have more meat, which might mean a misshapen appearance (but that just proves that they are handmade and therefore more delicious), while Sam would prefer ravioli with just a tiny smidgen of meat to approximate a machine-extruded symmetry. That must be how the Scotch-Irish prefer them. ;)

*A word for the wise(-a**): I just looked it up and found that raviolo is the Italian singular, but that term is now used mainly for large ravioli, not for the little bite-sized ones, which are called ravioli in the singular and the plural.