Holy ravioli

One of the Cincinnati traditions we adore is the Ravioli Dinner at the Sacred Heart Church (otherwise known as "Scared Heart"): http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/04/04/tem_taste04martin.html
Since 1911, the church has been serving a full Italian dinner to three or four thousand people twice a year, on Palm Sunday and in mid-October. It starts at noon, but it's best to miss the first rush and hit it around 2. You still wait on line, with lots of friendly, hungry people; you get hit up to play the raffle; and then you hand over $9 (new price this year) and get a ticket to check off your menu preferences. The maitre d' is a guy in a "Kiss me I'm Italian" apron who's constantly yelling "I gotta six! Who's a six?! Go see that guy at Table Ten!" He sends you into the huge, noisy church hall, which is packed with long tables, even on the dais (painted with amazing murals: an archbishop, some guys in frockcoats, and maybe Mother Seton, plus a few Indians in front of a sunlit seascape - anyway, definitely not Cincinnati). You say hi to the twenty other people at your table, which if you're lucky, will include a nun or two (gets you the quickest service). A little kid with a big tray will take your ticket, fight his way over to the side window, and will bring you: a little green salad in a styrofoam cup; a huge plate of spinach and meat-stuffed ravioli drenched in red gravy and crowned with a meatball; a cup of ice cream, and a cookie. Of course, there's plenty of shaker parmesan and soft white bread on the table, and you can even buy wine, but after we first tried it, we generally BYOB. Also, you can get spaghetti, but with ravioli made by devout Italian volunteers, why would you?
As you stagger out (unless you've been smart and brought a tupper, so you can save half your ravioli to eat as dinner later), you can buy fifty ravioli in a box to take home and freeze. That's two meals for us, and tonight we had one of them. We made fresh tomato sauce out of the few garden tomatoes we picked before the frost and successfully ripened (most exploded). Just sautéd onion, garlic, the tomatoes, and lots of fresh oregano and dried basil leaves, again from the garden. The tomatoes were watery, so during the process we had to drain them, boil their juice down, and put them back in the pan. Their red and yellow made the sauce very vivid, also very fresh-tasting over the ravioli. We put a block of pecorino romano on a grater, not a shaker, on the table, but otherwise it was a very genuine experience.
Would you like a drop of wine, Sister?