I made tortellini today.

Using my Grandmother's recipe and her old mercato pasta machine I hand cranked for hours. I kept telling myself it was physical therapy because I had to re-do the lengths of pasta many times. When you hand crank pasta you have to be consistent or the dough is thinner in some places. Right handed cranking left me with a lot odd textured pasta! I made spaghetti noodles first. It's easy because you just crank the flattened dough through a cutter. My left arm cranked the pasta when it came to cutting and my right arm caught the finished noodles. Totally the opposite of what I'm used to - but, you make adjustments.

Then came the tortellini ... tortellini is supposed to look like little hats. You take a square piece of pasta, no bigger than an inch and a half, and you fold it into a triangle, after filling the folded area with a ground veal and pork mixture. You then twist it and turn it so the opposite corners meet up.

My tortellini doesn't look anything like that. It looks like someone who didn't know what they were doing made them. They started out the right size and shape, but it was taking so long - I made three tortellini in 20 minutes! So, I said the h*ll with this. Who needs "therapy" that bad? - If you want to come for dinner, my tortellini are about the size of a fist but, they'll still taste good.

I'll serve them in chicken broth with garlic bread and we'll have very funny looking spaghetti with meatsauce.

So, we'll have an odd looking dinner tonight, that I spent 6 hours preparing but, I can say I made pasta from scratch and that's more than I could even think about doing 6 months ago.