The day before I was going to get rid of my pasta making machine as unused clutter we went out to dinner with friends. Guess what we had? Fresh pasta, made by our friends' 13 year old son. He mentioned how many eggs he used in his batch and suddenly a light went on my head.

Ding.

Eggs are protein. My incredibly fussy-in-his-eating son needs more protein. Fresh pasta uses eggs. My son likes pasta. I. Have. A. Pasta. Machine.

Last night I googled a variety of gluten free pasta recipes, but they were all quite tricky and used about three different types of flour and other odd ingredients. 

Now I'm a simple cook, and I had ORGRAN gluten free plain flour in the cupboard, so I decided to experiment. Sometimes this doesn't work, but today it did. So for all you other simple cooks out there with only one type of flour in your cupboard, give this a go.

1.5 cups of GF plain flour

4 eggs

1 tsp olive oil

1 tsp salt

Mix the ingredients together in a bowl with your hands. (The purists say do it on the bench, but I say why create more mess to clean up?) Knead a lot until it is stiff and then let it rest for a little bit. Well, actually, I skipped that purists bit too. My advice would be to make a cup of tea at this point. It helped me along with the scary part of putting it through the machine.

Set up your pasta machine. I divided my dough into about six or seven bits, flattening them out with my hand. I figured that dealing with too much dough at once was going to make me feel stressed. Then I fed them through the rollers on number 2 and laid them out on sheets of greaseproof paper. The next roll was with the machine on number 4, and then I put them through the spaghetti cutter attachment. Happily, they cut really nicely. I think it was because the dough was pretty stiff and not too sticky.

As with all fresh pasta, I cooked it in a big pot of boiling water with a splodge of olive oil for less than 5 minutes. My boys both gobbled it up - including the one who doesn't eat gluten free. He would have been horrified if he had realised his spaghetti wasn't made from wheat flour, but I wasn't going to tell him and you can't tell from the taste!