Variety Being The Spice And All That Crap...

(The truth about my love for birds of the domesticated sort especially)

I really do wish I could have a lot more chickens than I do. Philip is adamantly holding the line at five hens, which is so weird because he's agreed to let me raise quail instead. Such are our marital negotiations. Some men and women are negotiating the numbers of children they will have (that question has not arisen for us since the birth of our first), or whether or not to get a Hummer to compliment their outdoorsy quasi-military lifestyle, or even what color beige to paint their home. We negotiate birds.

We're allowed to have up to twelve "fowl" in McMinnville*. I love eggs. I love looking at them. I love gathering a variety of them that is inherent in a mixed flock. Some are light tan colored and more oblong, some are speckled, some are darker brown and rounder. If you are really lucky you'll also have one or two Araucanas to lay some green or blue eggs which never ceases to amuse me and perhaps a couple of banties. Banties are the dwarf version of any breed. Yes, chickens come in dwarf versions complete with little eggs. It takes two bantam eggs to equal the size of one large egg when you're cooking. So much trouble! Yet...how nice to enjoy the aesthetics of variety from the hen house.

I think cooking is as much about aesthetics as it is about taste. I don't mean, really, that it's important that you serve all your food attractively (though that is a worthy art as well), so much as I mean that when I pull out the ingredients for a recipe, I enjoy seeing my raw materials on the counter waiting to be processed into something completely different. I especially love it when those raw materials have not been given the great American standardization treatment to make them uniform. What a wonderful sight a basket of irregularly formed tomatoes is. Especially when they present themselves in a variety of shades, most of which cannot be found in the grocery store.

For the last two summers I have been enjoying the gorgeous variety of eggplants that my favorite U-pick** farm grows. They grow at least four kinds (I sometimes find up to six in their fields) so I get pale ones striped in lavender, deep black globed ones, long purple ones, long lavender ones, and white ones too. Seeing such a variety on my counter is enticing and almost subversive.***

I love eggs. I love cooking with them. I love holding them in my hands. I love to photograph them. I love to eat them. I feel about eggs the way some people must feel about an excellent rump roast or bacon.

Apparently I have quite an affinity for birds. Something I'm really only discovering now, though if I look into the past the evidence has been there all along. Let's take a brief trip down the fascinating**** birdy memory lane:

• When I was ten I spent more time hanging out in the hen house and chicken run than I did with friends. (Or I coerced my friends to hang around the hen house with me. There's photographic proof of this at my Dad's house.)

• I tried many more times than was decent to keep parakeets, who all died pretty fast from getting eaten by our many cats or scared to death by the thought of getting eaten by the many cats (the stupid birds have very weak hearts!). I know I went through at least three of them before my parents put an end to the sad parade of bird burials.

• When I lived in San Francisco I really empathized and enjoyed the pigeons that lived in the city too. In fact, many week-end days I could be found sitting on park benches in the park across the street from the Grace Cathedral carrying on a flow of chatter with the pigeons there. Or sometimes when I wanted a more exciting atmosphere I could be found carrying on very similar flows of chatter with the slightly more sophisticated pigeons of Union Square.

• Until we moved 12 hours north, we went to my dad's house every Christmas morning. Even though he's Jewish. We would have brunch there and hang out for most of the day. I think my bird love is pretty apparent by the fact that almost the first thing I do upon arrival at his house is head to the kitchen which is where Poncho lives. Poncho is a Cockatoo or a Love Bird, I'm not even sure which. What I do know is that I could be found next to his cage attempting a lively conversation with him in which I fully believed we came to a mutual understanding with each other every time.

• When visiting my old home town of Ashland Oregon I always go looking for Eggbert, a giant rooster we let loose there when we moved away. There had always been a band of escaped chickens living near the lake in Lithia park and when we moved we set our last seven chickens free. Eggbert was the only egg our hens hatched on their own with no incubator. Eggbert was majestic. I've never found the chickens again since moving away.

• Clearly it was a sign of bird love that when I deigned***** to go to the Sonoma County Fair with a neighbor friend several years ago I became embarrassingly spazzy over the chicken tent. I didn't stop talking about them for days and realized that now that I was an adult with a home I could have my own chickens!! I wasn't accounting for the New York princess though, who, like all princesses do, completely ruined my happiness (temporarily).

• When looking for a place to move to in Oregon I would not move to any city that didn't allow chickens in it's residential zones. Yes, I looked up city ordinances and zoning charts to make sure. That's the real reason we picked McMinnville. Because you're allowed to have up to twelve "fowl". Isn't it sad that my husband will only let me have five?

*Provided you meet the terms of the ordinance and provided you do not live under the evil iron hand of restrictive neighborhood CC&Rs.

**Bernards Farm

***It's possible I've used this word a little too often lately. I also almost used the word "frisson" again and I think a writer can only get away with using such words about once every six months or they may be accused of being falsely rebellious and poncey at the exact same time. That's just wrong!

****Highly subjective word in this instance.

*****I still thought I was a "city" gal and had not yet embraced my true nature. My, I really have outdone myself today with the footnotes.

Preserving Comes To A Close

Now that I am done with my canning season...(no, really, I'm done now)... I can finally cook like a regular person. The funniest thing about putting up so much food is that you really don't have time to cook regular meals. Your entire kitchen gets taken over by huge boiling pots of blanching vegetables and your bowls all fill up with fruit for peeling. Although putting food up starts in mid summer, it really doesn't pick up until harvest time when all the best produce is piling high on the farm wagons. This is also the best time to be eating fresh produce. So it's funny to have been putting up so much good food but to have eaten so little of it fresh, right now, while it's the best time to eat it all.

This week I intend to cook broccoli in every way possible: steamed, cream of broccoli soup, stir fry, and quiche. I want to make swiss chard quiche too while we still have our own fresh eggs. Hens often stop laying in the darker months when the light hours are at their shortest. They also tend to stop laying when molting which all of them are bound to do soon. Though I have to say their timing isn't so hot what with the nights getting so flipping cold already. Not a good time to be naked poultry.

Yesterday I spent some time back on the ice pack and heating pad. My back is still feeling weak. Wouldn't it be amazing if some day I didn't have back problems? I don't think you ever go back though, once it's started going to pots. Since I didn't think lifting things in the garage was a smart thing to do I ended up doing some hand stitching while in bed and then felt I needed to give my quilt project a HUGE boost, so I spent a couple of hours machine piecing. I love hand stitching but it's got to be said that machine piecing goes a hell of a lot faster and seeing as I've got a limited amount of time to do home projects, it's a relief to see blocks come together fast.

I'm going to share pictures of the blocks I have so far, of course. But all my real quilting friends out there need to understand that quilting is the one craft I let myself have fun with without making myself feel I must apply museum quality skills to. My corners often don't match up. Things go wonky. I don't let myself do this because of a failure to respect quilting as an art, I have the deepest respect for quilters like Monica and my Aunt Lin who make the most amazing pieces of art and whose points always match, whose stitching is gorgeous every inch of the way. No professional quilter is going to entreat me to help them with projects as they do Pam who not only works on other people's projects like Elizebeth's booth projects for quilt shows she shows her work in. It takes great skill with a needle to achieve such meticulous and gorgeous results.

I could apply such skill. I could. But I'm not going to. I choose to save quilting as a craft I can let my hair down for. I choose to approach quilting from a haphazard angle, see how it all comes together. Enjoy the wonkiness that inevitably ensues when you don't plan it all out ahead of time. It's play time without restrictions. I like the organic mistakes that occur when you play it all by ear (or eye, as the case may be).

I'm getting excited because I have never wrapped myself up in a quilt I've made on my own. Three babies out there in the world have been wrapped in my stitches, but I want to curl up in my chair with a full size quilt made by me. I may just tie the first two full size quilts off for expediency. Winter is coming and it's getting cold in our house. Making blankets is one of the oldest and most important homesteading skills. Sarah has a cabinet full of quilts she's collected and I want that too. If someone is cold just send them to the cabinet for a quilt.

I suppose I ought to have just put a picture of my quilt on this post. But I haven't taken them yet and didn't plan to talk so much about quilts.

I have an idea to do a food quilt. All fabrics with food on them. Before that I need to do a Scottish quilt for Philip. I haven't got the idea very clear in my head yet but obviously it will involve plaid. We love plaid. I want to make a quilt that reminds us of the time we've spent in Scotland. Possibly the best time in our lives. We walked the ragged wet icy hills in the highlands and were never so happy! I love traditional Scottish symbols such as thistles. I don't actually know if I like them because they're Scottish or if I like Scottish things because they celebrate plaid, fresh scones, thistles and ale. All things I loved before I ever set foot on the highland hills. Does it matter?

Time to go start my day with a brief and innocent trip to the quilt shop.

Note: The absolute most crazy thing is to have not included my friend Angela in the skilled quilters line up because she is another lady with some fierce needle skills and you can just bet all her points match. The problem is that we actually rarely talk about quilting and a lot more about writing. So I've come to think of her in such a different context. Sorry Angela!!!!.

Nine Very Old Eggs

Remember how I mentioned that you have to age your hen's eggs if you want to hard boil them because if they are too fresh they won't peel? Remember how I rudely laughed at everyone who has to buy their eggs from the supermarket and who think they're buying fresh eggs but aren't because I've never bought an egg from the store that wouldn't peel...yeah, that was just plain mean. I wasn't kidding though. Not to rub it in any one's faces, but I had to age these guys for three weeks. Yup. That says volumes about how old grocery store eggs must be.

I haven't eaten hard boiled eggs in a long time. I've been craving egg salad, or deviled eggs, or even just sliced egg on a salad nicoise (my version). Finally I get some boiled! But what do I do with them the second I boil them? Put them back in the fridge unused. Sheesh. They aren't getting any younger in there. I guess I'll make some egg salad today with my very tough and stringy garden celery. Doesn't that sound delightful?! (Why I can't grow good celery is a mystery. I think I will stop trying now.)

Every now and then I need to clear out all the wisdom in my head in order to let new wisdom in so I'm going to empty some out right now. Go ahead and dig in! Incidentally, if you need some advice about something please don't hesitate to ask while I have some wisdom left. I will dedicate a whole post to giving you advice if you like. (I always wanted to be an advice columnist). Here it is:

• Pizza is not a diet food. Unless it has no dough, no cheese, and no lard-dotted meat on it. Marinara sauce is fine to eat on a diet though. Go ahead and pig out on some red sauce with barely roasted veggies, you won't hurt your diet on that.

• Having a baby will NOT bring you and your spouse closer if you're having marriage problems. Instead, your infant will be like a megaphone amplifying all the ways in which you are inadequate and not working as a team. Babies are like bombs, not sutures.

• Love is NOT all you need. While love is all well and good and we all need some of it, don't be fooled by this song. There's probably something wrong with you anyway if you're getting all your wisdom from songs. But seriously, love is not going to feed you. It won't change diapers. It won't pay the mortgage (unless by "love" you really mean "prostitution"). And it isn't going to make President Bush less of an asshole. So don't come crying to me when love doesn't turn out to be the answer to all your problems.

• Life is hard and then you die. (Ooops, that was a very 1980's sentiment that slipped right out of the shadows of the grey matter. I had no idea it was lurking there.)

• If you don't think parenting is difficult then you're probably doing it wrong or someone else is doing it for you and I don't want to hear about it. Because then I might be forced to smack you. Which would send the wrong message to my child. It would be very un-Ghandi-like of me.

• Eggs and spermatozoa do not get better with age. It is best to use them before their expiration date which may not be convenient to your career or life, but in case no one noticed yet: nature doesn't give a shit about when we're emotionally ready to have babies. Science has made many things possible, like having babies later in life more safely, but often at a great cost.* So if you know you're going to want to have children, try to get moving on that in a timely fashion.

(I'm a lot less wisdomous than I thought, I'm now struggling to come up with bits and shreds of wisdom. I could never be a magazine mogul. Clearly. Maybe it's because I forgot to take my medication this morning. Yes, yes, I take wisdom meds. Doesn't everyone? I'm running off to take them now...wisdom will return after the following message....)

NEVER CHEAT ON YOUR SPOUSE OR KARMA WILL KICK YOU IN THE ASS WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT. (that threat was brought to you by the marriage police of America (me) and is supported by the Buttafuocos.)

• You should never let other people's definition of success bring you down. Be your own yard stick and you will definitely succeed, even if you succeed in ways unexpected. This is perhaps the greatest piece of wisdom I have acquired in my life lessons. Lately I've been struggling a little with my self esteem, but the one thing that really keeps me afloat is knowing that no one else's measurement of my life so far has the power to take away what I feel are my greatest triumphs.

Well, for right now I'm tapped.



*Just to be clear, I am not judging people for having babies at older ages, just pointing out that nature is still giving us all a very clear message about how wise that is with the increased risks still associated with such pregnancies and greatly increased infertility problems experienced by couples in their late thirties or their forties. It's a fact of life that the quality of eggs and sperm decreases as we age. That's not a judgment, just a fact.

The Amazing Patented Unpeelable Egg!

Ever wished your chicken eggs weren't so darn easy to peel? Ever found yourself making egg salad (again) and felt the ennui spread over your whole body because there's just no challenge to it anymore? Have I got some exciting news for you: now all you have to do is find yourself some super fresh eggs and your egg peeling experience will be transformed from one of boring ease to one that offers a chance to test your patience and determination to have egg salad, which, unless you're removing lots of yolks and editing your mayonnaise consumption, isn't good for you anyway.

That's right, and when I say "fresh", I mean eggs that are less than a week and a half old. Maybe your store bought eggs say "farm fresh" right there on the package...don't be fooled. You will be hard put to find actual fresh eggs at a store. If you can hard boil 'em and peel 'em with ease, they aren't fresh. How do I know this? Because I have eggs that are so fresh they are still warm from the chicken's...you know. Everyone who raises hens knows that fresh eggs don't peel well. So if you want to boil them, you need to wait at least a week. So I set a dozen aside for hard boiling purposes and let them wait around in the fridge for over a week. Just about a week and a half. They were still too fresh to peel. What a waste!

You know what that means, right? That means that store bought eggs are even older than that. Probably two weeks old. I have never once had difficulty boiling and peeling eggs that I bought in the store. So now I think I'll set aside a dozen to age in the fridge for two weeks, then find out if that's old enough.

As I recently admitted, I have not been skilled at cooking dry beans. Buying beans in cans, if you eat a lot of beans, gets a bit expensive. Since I am in no way prepared to buy cheaper beer, I figured I better ease the grocery budget somewhere and start acting as poor as I actually am. My good friend Lisa (not the knitter) here in McMinnville gave me the opportunity to join a little co-op she belongs to that orders bulk food from a company here in Oregon. Buying bulk beans at thirty cents a pound is so cheap I decided it was time to learn my way around dried beans. It's been an embarrassment to be so lame in this way. EVERYONE CAN COOK BEANS FROM SCRATCH.

And I pride myself on being a pretty darn competent cook.

My friend Chelsea told me how to cook black beans:

You put a bunch of them in a pot (specific amount up to you), cover the beans with broth (about three inches above the beans), bring the broth to a boil, then turn the beans down to barely a simmer. Do something else like achieve world peace and knit baby booties. The beans will plump up in a couple of hours, not stick, not break apart, and will, in fact, be perfect.

It totally worked!

Though Chelsea already knows it, and she and I are very unsentimental steely women, I really miss her. We've had some good talks on the phone, but nothing beats getting together to cook. We met in a natal nautics class at the YMCA because we were the only two pregnant women there who weren't swimming in a great aura of unmitigated joy, we had to bond in order to survive the heat of their annoying glow. So we would grumble and swear our ungainly way through water exercises in which grown women are made to play with plastic "noodles". We've been close friends ever since.

A couple of smart ass curmudgeons cooking better food together than most restaurants serve. Bickering ever so slightly over the fact that Chelsea thinks it's ridiculous for me to ask her to write any of her brilliant recipes down because they're all right there in her head. Where I should be able to read them, no problem. Because I routinely pick people's brains with nifty spy tools designed especially for stealing secret recipes from chefs. The salad dressing I make all the time is one that I learned from her. (And forced her to put on paper.) Thank you Chelsea!!

Our kids are so lucky to have us.

So now I can cook black beans. I made my first batch into some black bean chili to put over Mexican rice which I also made for the first time. The rice was pretty tasty, but also mushy. I will try again, making adjustments.

I have a recipe for polenta lasagna that I will soon share. (Very easy on the waistline, in case you were wondering.)

The Equality of Being

I once read a book about ants when I was a design assistant at Mulberry Neckwear. I was profoundly impressed by the information I gleaned from that book. Ants, it turns out, are capable of herding other creatures. Some ants herd aphids and harvest their body dew, much like humans milk cows. As far as I can tell, that means that ants are capable of using tools, which many people think is divinely limited to the human species and that that's what makes us "superior" to all other creatures.

I brought the subject of ants and their interesting habit of aphid milking at work where I then entered into a heated debate with a designer who was intensely offended that I would suggest that ants might actually have intelligence, that maybe humans aren't so sovereign after all. It offended him on a very deep level that I could compare ants to humans. (You see what a long tradition I have of offending people? It's almost like my life's mission to alienate and offend. And here I have always thought of myself as a kind person. Sheesh. The evidence to the contrary is everywhere.)

My main thought was that there's a lot we don't and can't know about other creatures, about their brain activity, about what thought processes they do or don't have. We barely know anything about our own and are still grappling with the idea that maybe our emotions are largely chemical, rather than spiritual. That's a big one for people to get. So if we barely know how to measure our own intelligence (yeah, I know, there's the whole IQ thing, but that only tells us about a certain kind of intelligence), then how can we be so sure that other beings aren't also intelligent? We can't communicate with them, but we can see they communicate with each other. What makes humans so sure of their superiority?

Part of what got me thinking about this this morning is that though I don't eat the flesh of animals, I eat a lot of eggs. In fact, I farm five hens, I keep them cooped up and every single day I go out and steal their eggs. We see eggs as human food. But sometimes I feel a little uncomfortable about this arrangement of mine. Those eggs are no different than the ones I carry around in my ovaries. Except that their eggs are a lot fresher than mine and much more likely to create an offspring without birth defects. So actually, their eggs are superior to mine. As I thought about the breakfast of eggs I might have, I had a flash of an image in my head. It's a part of what my brain does that made a psychologist conclude that I have some shadings of OCD and also convinced him that I have PTSS (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome).

In my head I flashed on chickens taking my tiny little almost microscopic eggs and cracking them open over a frying pan. No thoughts accompanied this image. It wasn't a thought, it was life in reverse flickering through my head. It happens all the time. After I realized that that image has flashed in my head a zillion times, I started thinking about it. Another image followed that one. The image of fish scraping out the cache of eggs from my ovaries and serving it on toast. Would that be so wrong? Humans consider it perfectly alright to remove viable little fish eggs from fish "ovaries" all the time, it doesn't matter that those eggs are the seeds of life. Then I thought about how obsessed humans are with their own ovaries, with each other's ovaries, and with all the little seeds that could-would-should-by-god-become-a-being.

Yet our eggs in our ovaries, or in our wombs after they've been fertilized, are no different than the eggs my hens keep laying with the instinctual expectation that this primal act will lead to reproduction: every being's imperative on this earth. Humans don't tend to think of the children of other animals as being valuable life forms. When we all talk about how important "life" is, though we don't say it, what we mean is "human life". Because, really, we shit on every other life form here on earth. Humans don't seem to value much life at all.

Although I am a vegetarian, I am comfortable with the food chain. I'm comfortable with the fact that we all have to eat something else that is or was living in order to survive. I eat plants and proteins stolen from animals. I don't eat their flesh because I was raised as a vegetarian and it makes me sick. Plus the texture makes me retch. And honestly, I'm uncomfortable ingesting the muscle of another being. Still, I don't think it's wrong to eat other animals or to use them to our dietary benefit.

What I do think is wrong is to assume that that's their only purpose on this planet and that all living things are here to serve mankind. That's arrogant and not true. We are merely a part of this planet. We don't actually own it. (Though we're working really hard to destroy it.) What I think is that it's important for all of us to respect the animals we use and eat. I think it's good that I must continually realize that what I'm really doing when I steal my hen's eggs is stealing their direct future. I think it's fine for me to do it, but I think it's important that I treat those girls with respect and understand that what I'm doing is stealing life to feed to my own. I think it's good for me to realize that if some other animal did it to me, it wouldn't be wrong. Surprising, (and most likely painful), but not wrong.

So in the end, what I believe in is the equality of being. We are not all equal in abilities, just by being born. Some people, like me, will always suck at playing basketball. I'm not equal in skill or understanding to all other people, nor they me, just by being a human. What we are, is of equal worth. We all play a part here. We all have responsibilities. But even if your achievements are comparatively very small, because that's what you have to give, you are still worth the same that everyone else is. And this includes all beings. I don't believe an ant is less worthy to be alive than me. But if it gets in my kitchen I might kill it to protect my food source, as that is part of my instinct to survive.

I might steal my hen's eggs, but I don't believe I have a "God given right" to do it or that because they are merely hens that their eggs are inferior to mine. They are providing me with an invaluable source of protein without actually having any say in it. So I treat them really well and am conscious of what I'm really doing. I do them the honor of acknowledging what my actions might mean to them. I'm not such a simpleton that I imagine them hanging around in their chicken run ruminating on their stolen eggs. But I do know that they have the same urge that I had to procreate, to eat, to survive. How intelligent are they? Most people believe chickens are among the dumbest creatures alive, but I would like to suggest that maybe we don't actually have the tools to measure the intelligence of other beings, since we barely understand ourselves.

Note: I was going to discuss my bean adventure, but it will have to wait. But see: I made them and they turned out PERFECT!

The fresh pasta pledge

(There are no excuses left not to make it fresh.)

We replaced the battery for my camera but found that my charger is also dead. I had just enough juice to take a couple of pictures yesterday. Hopefully the local camera store will also be able to replace that for me. Soon. This is a picture of my pasta dough. I was going to take more pictures of the whole process. Making pasta fresh is really easy when you have the right equipment. It's actually easy to do completely by hand, it just takes a lot longer. If you have a food processor and a pasta machine, there's really no excuse not to indulge in the best pasta you'll ever eat. My pasta machine is an attachment for my Kitchenaide mixer. It makes rolling and cutting the pasta super fast and easy. Not to mention really fun. I highly recommend this attachment. It costs about a hundred dollars and comes with the roller, a spaghetti cutter, and a fettuccine cutter.

If this is the kind of thing you'll do once a year it's hardly worth spending that kind of money. I worried about that a little which is why I didn't buy it for myself. Philip, being the super sweet guy he is, (and also being the main recipient of everything I make in the kitchen), bought it for me because he knew I wouldn't buy it for myself. I have used this attachment a lot. So it ended up being really worth the money for us.

We are now getting lots of eggs from our industrious girls: Henna, Pinny, Pearl, Flower Bud, and Dot. Anywhere from two to five a day. With the average being four. Which means we have plenty to share with friends, which we've started doing. With close to an extra dozen a week more than we need, I was also trying to think what I could make that would make use of so many eggs that I could store for later. Next winter I don't expect to get eggs for a while, so it makes sense to use them in something that can be preserved when there's tons of them. I've come up with two ideas:

The first is to work out a recipe for a quiche that will freeze well. One of my favorite things from Trader Joe's are their frozen quiches. They are wonderful to whip out when you need something fast. Just make up a salad and you've got a great fast meal.

The other idea is to make lots of pasta and dry it in nests. I could make herb pasta which would be a great way to preserve fresh herbs from the garden. I could make spinach pasta, beet pasta, and squid ink pasta. Wait, did I just say that? There is no way in hell I'm going to make squid ink pasta. Anyway, the pasta will keep for many months if kept dry. The difficulty with this plan is that I have got to get the knack for making the nests. I tried once and the pasta all stuck together too much.

Experimentation is in order. Pasta nests are so pretty. I have a book called "Lorenza's Pasta" by Lorenza De'Medici which is the most beautiful cook book I may have ever seen. There is a picture of dried pasta nests for sale at an Italian grocer's and the variety is incredible. Not only that, it looks gorgeous, I want to inhale the colors and I would like my pantry to look that colorful and inspired. In the picture, on the bottom shelf, beneath the freshly dried pasta, are a bunch of packages of the conventionally packaged pastas. The contrast is startling. The packages do not look like food. It is hard to imagine choosing the packaged pasta over the colorful sweet nests. Unless you are forced to for purposes of economy. Which I've been forced to consider at times.

It's cheap to make your own pasta. It's cheap to make it fresh. You can have that gourmet treat for the same price as the cheap packaged kind at trader Joe's. Two cups of flower, two eggs*. That's it. With the proper equipment it's also easy. The best part of making it yourself, though? If you've already tried fresh pasta I don't have to answer this for you. Do I really need to convince anyone out there that the taste is so superior that you will not even understand how far we've come from the true exquisiteness of pasta?


*This is the basic ratio of eggs to flour. Recipes vary, of course. You can also make pasta using no eggs, but why would you want to do that? Using eggs adds to the nutritional and protein content as well as contributing considerable flavor.

Obviously there are some people out there for whom gluten is like poison, so obviously this whole talk of pasta must seem tiresome. You can actually make pasta using quinoi and other flours too. It would be super cool if those who can't eat gluten could experiment to come up with a great recipe for home made pasta with NO gluten. Some people who are allergic to it are writing cookbooks. I'll bet those people could come up with something really great. Not that I'm trying to get pushy or anything.