Making food with what we have

I've been perusing the web for good recipes in which I can use eggs. We get at least one egg from a chicken each day, some days we get two eggs. Rarely does one hen skip two days, giving us a day off. So I've made fresh pasta with the eggs before, with delicious results. Last week I used up four eggs in some banana bread. Today I counted eleven eggs in our carton and thought some action was required. The recipes I found online are mostly custards, cakes, quiches, frittatas, and breakfast egg dishes. So I resorted to making a batch of pasta (with a twist) and turning it into ravioli. The twist was some lemon zest added to the pasta dough.

I had to decide on the filling so I looked around at what I had, and thought about what would taste nice with lemon, and came up with the idea for a filling composed of some cooked chicken (left over from roasted chicken), roasted pumpkin (I've had the pumpkin on display for months), and some garlic greens, parsley, and chard – all from the garden. I added a small pile of parmesan shavings, some more lemon zest,  and two eggs to help with adhesion, and went to work making the ravioli.

When I cut open the pumpkin, to scoop out the seeds before roasting it in the oven, I found some of the seeds had sprouted and grown roots inside the pumpkin. It was a remarkable sight, so I took some photos. I also carefully extracted a couple of the rooted plants and put them in pots. 

A tiny garden growing inside the pumpkin.

One of the sprouted seeds I planted

The rest of the scooped out interior, with a jumble of sprouted and unsprouted seeds

The experimental ravioli filling ended up being absolutely edible, but rather lemony. I was going to serve it with some reheated tomato-based sauce I had in the freezer (left over from a batch of lasagna I'd made a while back). When we tasted the sample ravioli I cooked, it seemed like it would be better with an alfredo sauce. Well I nixed that idea on account of my cholesterol and my waistline, plus it would have meant a trip to the store. So we had it with the tomato sauce.  

I froze two trays of ravioli though, so maybe we'll try the alfredo sauce when we cook the next batch. I'll have to invite company though, so I can justify buying the heavy cream.

A Sunny January Day

Today the weather report said sun and temps of 75 F.
It was a lovely day to spend in the garden. I let the chickens have the run of the whole yard. They like to hang out on the decomposed granite patio and also to dig in the Mulberry leaves, which cover the mostly ornamental beds nearby. The hen that is laying is very focused on finding bugs to eat. She scratches at the leaves and then snaps up any bugs she sees. The rooster and the other hen do the same, but with less focus.
While they were visiting various places in the yard I spent some time collecting scion wood from the white peach and the Moorpark apricot. I'm going to work on grafting in the spring and want to have some dormant wood to work with. I'll try grafting them both on various peach seedlings I have growing in a few places. I also took some black currant cuttings and stuck them in the ground.
Around 2 p.m. the hen which lays went into the coop and settled into her little dent in the straw, and went about laying an egg. I watched her from the window for a while and she seemed to not be making progress. Then the rooster and the other hen came in, and he stood right by her and the other hen took a little nap nearby. All this went on for some time, so I left and waited, until I saw them come out of the coop, to go get the egg. It was still warm when I picked it up. I now have half a dozen peewee eggs in the fridge. This is a collection from the past week or so.
The peewee eggs translate to large eggs with four peewees being the same as 3 three large. Last weekend I used four peewee eggs to make a batch of fresh pasta that I then used to make ravioli. The yolks were such a deep yellow that the sheets of pasta were a brilliant yellow when the sun shone through them.
Chances are good I'll repeat the procedure. The raviolis were delicious. Fresh made pasta is a wonderful food.