My grandma came from Italy when she was only 12 yeas old in 1959. She came with her mom, dad, five sisters and two brothers. In Italy, they made almost everything they ate homemade nothing was store bought except for some ingredients. My grandma also grew up on a farm that had nearly every fruit and vegetable her and her family would need. When my grandma came to America, her and her family brought a lot of their traditions of cooking with them. The one thing that she loves to make all the time is raviolis.

It takes a lot of work and time to prepare and make raviolis. The first thing is to make the filling, my grandma makes her ricotta most of the time or she does something different like she did this time, and she made what she calls basket cheese that is pretty much ricotta just cooked and settled a little differently. She makes the cheese by boiling water and adding junket tablets to the boiling whole milk with lemon juice and little pieces of cheese start to float to the top and are spooned out and put into the basket mold to settle. The next thing she does is make the dough; she uses special dough flour that you can only buy in certain stores. She mixes the flour with eggs, water, and baking soda. She then rolls the dough into flat pieces and uses a ravioli mold to shape the dough into raviolis. First one pieces of dough is put on one side of the mold, then the holes that are made are filled with the basket cheese that was made then another flat piece of dough is put on top of it and pressed down by another side of the ravioli press. The press then cuts and seals all the raviolis into individual pieces.