10 kitchen time.

I spent most of Saturday morning in my kitchen, making homemade cheese ravioli with my mother-in-law.

There are a lot of steps to making ravs, and every family has a completely different method of accomplishing the same task.  The process this time was a little foreign to me, as I was used to the way my own mother would make them when I was a child.  It felt almost wrong learning this new method, like I was getting let in on a secret that I wasn't supposed to know about.

The hardest part has to be forming the dough around the cheese, making sure to get all the air bubbles out (but without making any holes in the dough) so they won't explode when you try to cook them.

Cutting them out is almost as fun as cutting fabric!  Plus there's no measuring (bonus!).

After pinching the edges with a fork, they all get lined up on cookie sheets.

And added to a pot of boiling water to cook.

Then they're left to dry off on cloths, in this case, vintage pillowcases (see that embroidery?).

We tested out our new pasta cutter with the excess dough...perfect for some fettucine!

After 3+ hours in the kitchen, we package up 12 dozen delicious cheese ravioli.  Yum!

It feels so satisfying to put all that work into turning bricks of cheese, flour, and egg and into something so good.  It also reminds me how much I enjoy spending time in the kitchen.  I'm pretty sure my husband is happy about it too, considering how much he loves cheese ravs.  Now all that's left is to eat them!  For some reason, I don't think we'll have any trouble with that part.