Mr. O'Stein and Mr. Raviol'

Mr. Willie O'Stein does make a mean round o'corned beef.



When you live in a city with a first class Italian deli like Lucca who specializes in making fresh ravioli, making home made ravioli yourself has to be a labor of love. And laborious it is, though the truth is that The Great Plotnik has loved working with bread and pasta dough for as long as he can remember. To feel that moment when flour, eggs and a little olive oil decide to stop fighting and become an elastic organism that the baker can feel coming alive in his hands, is one of the reasons Plotnik began cooking in the first place. You get more of these great aha! moments with yeast dough, but pasta dough is ten times faster and a whole lot easier.

But it takes some time to make the dough, and then you have to run it through the pasta machine to thin it and strengthen the gluten, turning it into long strips of dough that you can set on your butcher block counter, brush with egg wash and then fill with the three-cheese-and-spinach filling you just made before you started the dough.

The filled ravioli cook very quickly when they're fresh (and not dried or frozen), and then they get covered with the mushroom ragout that Ducknik made last week in advance of the kids coming to town, but no one ever got around to eating.

Don't forget the Il Gioiello Zinfandel. Man!