It Tastes better Than It Used To

   Several weeks ago C, my Dad and I went to the town my grandparents lived in. Every so often Dad drives out there to check on the trees that were planted on the land my grandparents used to farm.
  Whenever we go out that way we make several stops. We have to go to a local meat market, the cemetery near the family church and an Italian restaurant. My grandmother worked at this restaurant as a cook.
  It's only open for supper. During the day you can get take out. They sell handmade frozen ravioli, cavatelle, sauce, sausage and pizza. I got a couple bags of ravioli and a couple bags of cavatelle.
  Cavatelle, for those of you that may not know, is type of pasta. It's about an inch long. C says it remind him of one of those small, cone shaped sea shells. It could also look a bit like a raisin shaped piece of pasta. I've never seen it anywhere outside of the area where my grandparents lived.
  I could never understand why people liked cavatelle so much. My grandmother ran a catering business on the side and many brides wanted cavatelle at their wedding dinners. My brother wanted them to be served at his high school graduation. I think if my grandmother had still been alive when he got married, there would have been cavatelle at his wedding. I really didn't like it that much. I'd rather have ravioli or even long spaghetti.
  Even though I didn't like it much, I did learn to make it. One way is to use a cavatelle maker. The other way is to roll it by hand.  It made by rolling the dough into a rope. You either feed it into the maker or you cut off pieces and roll the pieces backwards with your index finger.
  I'm not really sure why I got the cavatelle. Maybe it was because I didn't know if C had eaten them before and wanted to share something from my younger years with him.
  Later that week we invited some friends over for dinner. Since Italian food is the easiest thing to make, I decided to cook a bag of ravioli and a bag of cavatelle. I served the cavatelle with some mini meatballs to make it more substantial. Cooking that pasta brought back memories for me. I could remember my grandmother heating large pots of water to cook the pasta for holiday meals when family members in the area would gather at their farm. There would be condensation on the windows and the whole kitchen would be steamy. We'd drop the pasta into the boiling water and then wait for it to float to the top. After it was cooked we'd put the pasta in large serving bowls and cover them with tomato sauce.
  I set the food on the table and we all served ourselves. I took a small portion of the cavatelle and a couple of meatballs. I ate one of the cavatelle. It was good. I had another. It was just as good or maybe better. For some reason the cavatelle tasted really good to me almost as good as the ravioli. (Since ravioli is my favourite Italian dish, that is saying a lot.) I couldn't believe how good it tasted. I was worried that people wouldn't like it, but I quit worrying. If I liked it I knew the others would as well.
  I wondered why it tasted so good. Maybe I was feeling a little nostalgic. Maybe it was due to the fact that I hadn't had them in so long. Absence does make the heart grow fonder.  Maybe my tastes had changed a little bit. Maybe it was a really good batch. I don't know.
   What I do know is that the next  time I make a trip to the farm, I'm going to get more cavatelle. It sure tasted better than it used to.