A little pasta masterclass

WE were taught how to make Crete Pasta today. To give it the correct name it is Skiouficha, made from two kinds of flour, a little olive oil and hand-formed into small pieces.
   These are then dredged in flour and then, when partially dry, immersed in hot water until they rise to the top, and then served with cheese and or tomato sauce. Rather like Italian Gnocci.
  Pasta has always been part-and-parcel with the Greek kitchen cabinet. Though popular belief maintains that Marco Polo returned to Italy from his travels in China bearing pasta, experts now surmise that the food may not have come from any one place but from several, including Ancient Greece.
  Many scholars argue that the Greeks had a kind of primitive pasta in the form of a grilled batter that they called "laganum." The word may be the etymological root of what the Italians call lasagna. Furthermore, the word for macaroni most likely has Greek origins, given that the food closely resembles makaria, an ancient Greek funerary dish. The Ancients asserted that sweetened, wheat-based foods were highly symbolic of rebirth and regeneration, and would therefore serve such foods in an effort to honour the dead.
  It was the ladies of our social group KAPI who held the demonstration, making more than enough to serve everybody, as well as then turning the dough into triangles and deep frying it, serving it with either sugar or honey.