If you’re a foodie, then (in addition to your collection of stinky cheese and expensive vinegar) it is crucial to have foodie friends - people you can completely “geek out” about food with. For example, my fiance may nod appreciatively when I gush on and on about the beautiful radishes I bought at the farmers market - but my foodie friends gush right back - and give me recipes.

Another benefit of having foodie friends is the amazing food field trips they invite you to - like the tortellini-making party I attended last Sunday. A friend of mine has a cousin (Carla) who grew up going to Italy every summer where she learned how to cook from her Italian family. Eager to share her passion for Italian food with others, Carla invited a group of us into her gorgeous kitchen for a cooking lesson.

Listening to Carla talk about the many Mediterranean summers she passed in her aunt’s kitchen made me a little wistful for my Jewish bubbe and my great-grandmother from Lithuania, neither of whom I never was fortunate enough to meet. But there was no time to be wallow that Sunday - there was too much pasta to make!

Photos and a recipe below the jump.

Carla welcomed our group of novice pasta makers with a plate of cheese, basil and good bread. We opened one of the bottles of Prosecco that we brought in thanks, clinking our glasses to the wonderful afternoon ahead. After a bit of gabbing, she set us to work on creating a mid-afternoon feast of freshly made linguine (regular and spinach), garlicky pesto, a bolognese sauce, and a wonderfully fragrant sauce made with mushrooms, onions, and cream (and a more authentic version with ham for those who ate it).

I outed myself early on in the afternoon as a vegetarian, quickly reassuring everyone that I was happy to stay away from the meat dishes and enjoy everything else. Carla turned her attention to the bolognese, adding a cup of milk to the bubbling meat sauce. “This dish would be especially bad for Jews,” she said which prompted me to out myself as a mostly kosher-keeping Jew as well. Turned out, Carla’s boss is an Orthodox Jew, so she knew all about kosher dietary limitations. On the spot, she graciously offered to alter some of her original recipes so that I could taste them (no small sacrifice for an Italian food enthusiast, I’m sure!)

The highlight of the afternoon centered around making tortellini - from flour and eggs to boiled and swimming in sage butter. By this time we’d opened another bottle of wine - a chilled Italian white which Carla served infused with a fat sprig of rosemary.

I’ve always envied the way farmers get the chance to interact with food on such a deep level, watching plants grow from tiny seedlings to full-fledged, edible vegetables. (I can barely keep house plants alive, let alone care for a tomato or onion plant.) But as we stretched the dough into long, thin sheets, filled them with ricotta and parsley and twisted them into pouches, I certainly felt a lot more connected my food than I normally would pouring out pre-formed tortellini into a pot of boiling water.

The tortellini that we made were utterly imperfect - the shape of our fingers, not a machine. Along the way, Carla shared tips and technique - the tachlis of tortellini - but there was also a certain amount of intuition involved, a “feeling our way” as we twisted square after square of dough. As we sat down to eat that afternoon, clinking our glasses once again, I tasted not only the pasta, but our labor, the laughter of the afternoon, and a glimpse of a family’s food tradition hidden amidst the dough.

Check out the photos of our tortellini adventure

Carla shared with us the ancient Italian secret of mixing pasta dough with a food processor. She promised us it created a perfectly luscious pasta noodle without the mess of the old “egg in a well of flour” method.

Carla kneaded flour into a batch of spinach dough, which we used to make linguine. (The water in the spinach made the dough a bit wet, so the extra flour evened things out.)

We used a pasta machine to thin out the mounds of dough into perfectly flat sheets. You can buy one here.

We filled our tortellini with a ricotta cheese and parsley mixture. The original plan was a pork and chicken mixture, but once Carla found out I was a vegetarian and Jewish she kindly switched the menu!

The first step to making tortellini is pressing the dough into a triangular packet around the filling. A little bit of water on the tips of your fingers helps seal the dough together.

Here are our beautiful tortellini! They look pretty authentic, no?

Basic Pasta Dough
This is not the exact dough recipe we used, but it’s from Gourmet, so I trust it completely!

2 cups flour
2 1/2 large eggs
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 to 2 tablespoons water

In a food processor blend all ingredients except water with a pinch salt until mixture begins to form a ball. If mixture is too dry, add enough water, a little at a time, to form a stiff dough.

On a lightly floured surface knead dough until smooth and elastic, about 8 minutes. Pasta dough may be made 2 hours ahead and chilled, wrapped well in plastic wrap.