Fresh pasta is great fun to make, and takes quite a lot of effort but is really worth it. You'll need to invest in a pasta roller but won't regret it - and it's one of the most impressive ingredients you can feed your guests.

First things first - this is a basic recipe. If you play around with different types of flour and quantities, you will be able to achieve different effects. One thing that you can remember is that flour comes in "grades" in Italy, and these grades are specific to different types of cookery. Pasta is generally made with grade OO flour, which is quite high in gluten and leads to a firmer and more elastic consistency, but you can use durum wheat flour, semolina flour, and many others.

For this recipe we'd suggest that you use the kind of flour you'd use for making bread - so strong. You shouldn't use self-raising flour. For each 2-person serving, take 110g of sieved flour (with a pinch of salt) and one egg. Heap the flour on a smooth, non-wooden work surface and make a crater in the middle of it. Crack the eggs into this little crater - they should stay in and not spill everywhere if you've made it deep enough - and mix the flour in slowly using your fingers. Obviously you don't want this to run everywhere in a total mess so you should use your hands to bring a little flour in, mix it into the eggs, thickening it with a little more flour at a time until you're left with a smooth dough - not too moist and sticky, not dry and prone to breaking up.

Next, you'll need to knead. Remove the dough for a minute while you clean and dry your work surface, then flour it and fold, knead and twist the dough for a full ten minutes until the required elasticity is reached - it should be quite springy. A fun thing to do here is to lift the dough up a couple of times, after five minutes of kneading or so, and throw it down with force straight at the work surface - it all helps, but make sure you don't end up bouncing it round the kitchen by mistake.

Wrap the dough in clingfilm and leave to rest in a cool place for thirty minutes or so. To roll out the pasta you should really use a machine as the required rolling with a thin, long pasta rolling pin is almost too much effort and requires a practised hand. Put the dough between the sheets three or four times, starting on the widest setting and going down, in satsuma-sized lumps so as not to end up with sheets which are too long. Let the sheets rest for 15 minutes or so before you cut them - this stops them from sticking to each other - and then trim to the required shape, using a knife or the cutting rollers on your machine.

To cook fresh pasta, plunge it into vigorously boiling water for about thirty seconds. Any you don't use can be dried prior to cooking and kept for a couple of weeks.