During the last long weekend, we finally tried a culinary experiment that was on the back of our minds for a while. A friend of ours has an industrial-grade Italian pasta-making machine, and we used it to make Russian-style dumplings called pelmeni. They are similar to Italian ravioli, but stuffed with raw ground meat that is cooked at the same time as its pasta cover.
I always thought that making dumplings by hand was a special social tradition for our family. It turns out that high-output ravioli production line is even more fun and socially engaging. The ravioli machine crunched 5 kg of ingredients into long strips of dumplings. My seven-year-old daughter enormously enjoyed peeling off the dumplings from a fast-moving band and setting them on drying trays.
The verdict is that the result of the culinary experiment was a complete success. The dumplings turned out to be quite different from both Italian ravioli and Russian pelmeni, but both Russians and Italians among us liked them.
Another success was that Bruno, our four-months-old puppy, stayed home alone for more than three hours without a bathroom accident and was completely content when we came back. Small victories are so sweet!
