If you've never had handmade pasta in Italy, you're missing out.
My mother in law makes ravioli by hand for special occasions:
* She mixes the flour, water and salt
* That is then spread out into sheets with the help of a hand-cranked machine.
* She then uses a cutting roller to cut those into the right shapes.
* Then the filling (mix of greens) goes into each one by hand and it's closed up.
* They get cooked.
* At the end they get a healthy bunch of ragù (bolognese meat sauce, if you must) on them.
I feel guilty eating them, because it takes hours and hours to do all that, and then it's gone in a few minutes it seems like.
If you want to honor her time you shouldn't waste a moment on guilt, you should just let the taste of the pasta linger as long as you can, until it is interrupted by something else besides guilt!
You can get back all of those moments she put in by savoring the dish. That's the beauty of well made food: it will tell quite a story in your body if you let it.
Maybe you should gift her with a newer pasta machine. :)
Pasta certainly isn't a staple of Finnish cuisine, but through family I have Italian relatives, and my parents have been making handmade pasta since before durum wheat was widely available here (it certainly was a very different world back then). Their hand cranked pasta machine has among other “heads” a tool for ravioli, taking in two sheets of pasta dough and automatically applying contents for each one it cuts. Certainly faster than filling them one by one, can't tell if you can taste the difference. (I really used to like pasta, shame that certain grains and I don't get well together.)
My mother in law makes ravioli by hand for special occasions:
* She mixes the flour, water and salt * That is then spread out into sheets with the help of a hand-cranked machine. * She then uses a cutting roller to cut those into the right shapes. * Then the filling (mix of greens) goes into each one by hand and it's closed up. * They get cooked. * At the end they get a healthy bunch of ragù (bolognese meat sauce, if you must) on them.
I feel guilty eating them, because it takes hours and hours to do all that, and then it's gone in a few minutes it seems like.