What to do when life hands you lemons...

...Make lemonade, of course!!!

Except in this instance, life handed me eggs. Massive beautiful duck eggs to be precise. My wonderful farmer Khaiti had a fridge malfunction and dozens upon dozens of her beautifully packed and ready for the shelves duck eggs froze and expanded cracking the shells and oozing all over.

There was nothing wrong with the eggs except that they were no longer saleable and needed to be used pronto. Her misfortune was my good fortune and yesterday evening I was the happy recipient of a big bowl of duck eggs.


So what did I make? Pasta, of course! I had tried to make pasta from scratch once, thinking that eggs and flour couldn't be that complicated to put together. After that attempt I realised why fresh pasta at a deli is so expensive. If you don't have all the gizmos, it is hard work and time consuming to boot! But I have a good kitchen minion and when someone else is doing the kneading it is not too bad at all!

It is a simple process really. You measure your flour and make a well in the middle. Crack in the eggs and start combining until the dough comes together. Then, the hard part. The dough needs to be kneaded at least 5-10 minutes to develop the gluten which makes it nice and elastic when you cook it. I have no problem kneading bread dough but pasta dough is an entirely different beast. It is hard and dry and a minute feels like and hour! Enter kitchen minion...

After kneading let the dough rest then roll out thin (this demands some vigourous rolling but nothing quite as demanding as the kneading). You can make raviolis by cutting little squares and filling them (in this case, with chard and spinach from the garden and feta from Khaiti) then crimping them closed. Or cut them into ribbons for tagliatelle or linguine. We did some of both and froze what we weren't going to use immediately.


We still had tons of eggs left, so we made more pasta and this time took the lazy man option and just made lasagna! Nice big easy to handle sheets.


Since the greens are in full swing in the garden, we predictably made a chard and spinach lasagna. You would think I would be sick of the stuff by now, but you never really tire of greens that fresh!!!

The lasagna we had for dinner last night and it was delicious.


Thank you Khaiti for your wonderful gift!!!!

We froze enough pasta sheets for 3 more lasagnas which we will be making as soon as mum gives up her Bolognaise recipe...