We are making our own pasta. This sounds like such a worthy thing to do, and fairly pointless, given that you can buy pasta for less money than the cost of the flour. But, we have eggs. Lots and lots of eggs. We are collecting something like 15 a day at the moment, which is nice, but it does mean that if you don’t feel like an omelette today (and after fried/poached/boiled eggs for breakfast, pancakes for lunch, and egg sandwiches for supper you may or may not feel like an omelette)you will have 30 eggs tomorrow. 45 on Tuesday. And so it goes on.

So, rather than boil them up and feed them back to the chickens (which we have done), or boil them up and feed them to the pigs (a fine idea, and we do this as well), we make pasta. The recipe is: 100 grams of strong flour, and an egg. Not exactly rocket science. So, half a kilo of flour in the food processor, six eggs (i.e. five eggs, and one for luck because we are trying to get rid of the things), and whizz it until it makes a nice ball of dough. a few drops of water can be added if it’s still too crumbly, which ours is when we are using up some dubious brown flour that we bought to make bread, but which doesn’t rise, so is now pasta dough.

Showing off with a continuous loop of pasta on the machine – fun, but actually better results if you just wind it through as one long strip. We will leave the flashy stuff to Masterchef contestants. Note the flour dredger – you can’t shake too much flour onto the dough, really. Be enthusiastic with it!

And the finished article, drying That is about 2 kilos (2 kilos of flour, 24 eggs, and perhaps some sweat).

Ok, perhaps it is less than 2 kilos, after tax.