And speak of the devil, I live only a few miles from Ianiros! Now I’m hankering for a big tub of oil cured olives, the wrinkly kind. Salty as hell though. And a pound of provolone to go with it.

As a little kid in the early 60s I remember watching one of my Italian aunts making cavetelli one time. She called them ‘cavatelle,’ used her fingertips to roll them. I don’t know how fast a cavatelli ‘machine’ can crank them out but my aunt went zip-zip-zip. I remember she rolled the dough out flat on a wood board then used a wheel cutter with a big wooden handle on it to criss cross the dough. Then zip-zip-zip she rolled the little squares against the board right where they sat. It looked like she was just counting them with her fingers as she zipped along. I was transfixed watching her hand go like a typewriter, all the way left then up, all the way right then up a row. Did all of them, sprinkled flour on them then scraped them up with a big spatula into a bowl. I don’t think it took her more than five or ten minutes to roll them all up.

If a machine can beat that that’s one hell of a machine.

What a bummer it is not to realize at the time that all that fine Italian food, breadmaking, winemaking, gardening, and tree grafting I was surrounded by as a kid was so unique. When it came to food, all we kids wanted to do was scarf it down then run outside and play. Now if I could go back in time I’d write every last single thing down about how to do all that.

Hope after 4 years you still get this “Thanks” from me.