Fresh Pasta

Reasons chickens are better than roosters:

1- Chickens lay eggs.

2- Chickens don’t crow at 3am.

We had a rooster once. Dad thought it would be a good idea to get a silkie chicken and rooster pair. The logic was that we thought we would end up with some eggs and the pair of them would look pretty neat. What he did not account for was the fact that our rooster would turn out to be deranged. He had no clue what time of day or night it was and would crow for hours on end in the middle of the night. I hated that rooster. One day Dad had finally had enough of him too and took the pair out to a friend’s farm where the rooster could crow as much as he wanted without robbing us of sleep and sanity. Now we have six chickens and although I’m not sure why Dad thought we needed SIX of them, I like them a whole lot better than that stupid rooster. Six chickens, however, equal up to six eggs a day. That means I have to continuously come up with ways to use them up.

Besides ice cream, one of my favourite ways to use eggs is by making homemade pasta. Michael Ruhlman, in his new book Ratio gives this easy to remember recipe for basic pasta dough:

Pasta Dough = 3 parts flour : 2 parts egg

I find measuring by weight a whole lot easier than by volume or piece, especially if some of the eggs your chickens are laying are double yolkers. But for those of you that don’t have a scale, (just go buy one, seriously) Ruhlman says that ratio works out to approximately 1 cup flour : 2 eggs. I use 00 flour when making pasta, (an Italian fine grind) and I find it works the best. Once you’ve got your pasta dough made there’s no end to the things you can do with it. I would be happy eating fresh pasta with lots of butter and a little cheese but since I was cooking for others I thought it would probably be better to make a meal of it. So I made a pesto sauce and also fried up some green onions, red peppers, bacon, shrimp and scallops. Tossed the whole thing together and there was dinner. Very good dinner.