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This has been a hectic week! K and I went to PA last weekend, and we chose this week to begin 5:30 a.m. workouts. It's been nice to have the evenings free to do nothing (without feeling like a bum for it), but it's also meant I've been a little more tired and haven't been on the computer so much. This too shall pass. :)

So we were in PA last weekend for a nice family tradition of K's. It was actually his first time to participate and mine.

K's grandmother came over from Italy as a teenager. She died when K was stationed in Korea in 2000 or 2001, so a few years before I came along. I've heard lots of stories about her, though, and most of them have been about how amazing of a cook she was. She did it all with her hands; she used no measuring cups or measuring spoons. Her food was authentic Italian, and its legend lives on in the family.

K's mom continued making her mother's recipes. The one she stuck with most was her mother's ravioli. When K's mom passed away in 2006, her sister and her husband (K's aunt & uncle) carried on the recipe. It was just the two of them the first year, but the next year, K's other aunt & uncle joined, along with K's dad. It's grown each year since. And so has the amount of ravioli they've made.

This was the first year K wasn't deployed during the ravioli fest, so we were excited to join in on the fun.

We made 1,124 individual raviolis.

The pictures I'm sharing now were met with quite a bit of protest from K's uncle. Since this is a family recipe, we have to make sure the secrets aren't compromised. I assured him that these photos wouldn't give away what goes into the composition of the ingredients. Only the assembly is shown here.

The most sauce I've ever seen at one time, and the biggest bowls and pots I've ever seen. They don't mess around!

Getting set up. We had two tables, with 4 people working at each. The other 2 people were cranking out dough as we turned it into ravioli.

Let the assembly begin!

The finished product! (Well, almost. We still had to cook it.) :)

We enjoyed homemade red wine while we made the ravioli. After a couple of glasses, I was feeling a bit tired and laid down. I wound up taking a quick nap, which meant I got teased quite a bit for falling down on the job. I assured the family that I was just using my time wisely while we were waiting on more dough. I told them I'd put so much energy and passion into the ravioli I'd made that I needed to rest to continue. Hopefully I didn't manage to get myself removed from future invitations!

After we had used up all the filling, we took a nice break to enjoy the snowfall that had started while we cooked. Piper had a blast playing in it with K's aunt & uncle's labradoodle!

Most of the ravioli went into bags and then to the freezer. After it froze, we divided up the bags among those of us who had made it so we can enjoy it throughout the year. (We already cooked some this week!)

But before we all left, of course we had to enjoy the fruits, er, pasta of our labor. Delicious!