cooking FOR fun
WITH SAM BOZZO
Traditional & Seasonal
Home
Made
Ravioli
W
elcome to the first installment in my new series,
Cooking for Fun, which focuses on family,
friends, recipes, and the joy of getting together
to celebrate traditional and seasonal cooking.
Don and Chris Bevilacqua live a few doors down from my
home. For years we have compared notes on our ravioli making.
Don makes a great dough, and he enjoys the process. From one
roll, he can produce dozens of gorgeous raviolis. In contrast,
my wife Judy and I like to focus on the filling and let someone
else make the dough. As luck would have it, former Mayor Don
Gage told us about a place in South San Francisco that would do
just that. I’ll get back to that in a minute.
Our recipe for filling originated with Frank and Alyceann
Ginelli, who lived in Gilroy for many years before moving to
Placerville. We’ve adapted the original, so we call ours the
Ginelli/Bozzo recipe. Instead of chuck roast and pork roast,
we use ground chuck/hamburger and ground pork because it
doesn’t poke holes through the dough like roasted meat tends to
do. Then comes the spinach. If frozen chopped spinach is used,
it needs time to thaw and dry, otherwise, it’s watery. Not good
for ravioli! This is why we allow two days to make the filling.
Following up on Don Gage’s tip, Judy and I took a batch
of our best ravioli filling and headed north to the Home Maid
Ravioli Company, located on 360 Shaw Road in South San
Francisco, eager to give them a try. One batch of our filling
was enough to fill more than five pounds of one-inch raviolis,
conveniently freezer wrapped and boxed. We looked forward to
returning home and cooking them. No more home-made ravioli
dough meant no more vacuuming the kitchen with our Shop Vac!
If you visit Home Maid Ravioli, plan to go on a Monday,
Wednesday, or Friday, and arrive before 8 am. That way you can
drop off your filling, and while you’re waiting for your raviolis,
you’ll have time to head out like we did for breakfast or window
shopping in the nearby communities of Burlingame, San Mateo
or Millbrae. We came back to pick up our order around noon.
You can also order two-inch raviolis if you prefer the larger
size. The brochure indicates that five pounds of filling will get
you ten boxes, and that’s the minimum order size that they will
accept. Learn more at homemaidravioli.com.
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GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
Judy and I have made the trip to Home Made Ravioli an
annual tradition and Don’s been tagging along with us for several
years now. We have a great time browsing through local ethnic
grocery stores and fabric shops and found a great neighborhood
Coffee Shop called Nini’s (100 North Idaho Street, San Mateo).
Last year our two families brought home 137 boxes of ravioli
from Home Maid (and that’s four dozen to a box)!
If you don’t have time to make the trip north, try LJB farms
on Fitzgerald Avenue in San Martin. They sell a variety of raviolis
from Home Maid Raviolis. Check it out after Thanksgiving and
before Christmas Eve. Find them online at ljbfarms.com.
My friend Don also makes a great ravioli recipe with Bartlett
pears, Parmesan cheese, and mascarpone adapted from celebrity
chef Lidia Bastianich. You can browse through her recipes at
lidiasitaly.com/recipes/.
Christopher Byrne of Huffington Post said it nicely, “Holiday
traditions, family traditions, cultural traditions. All of these have
meaning and import