If you think that pasta – real, mouth-watering pasta – has left your life forever with your gluten allergy or celiac diagnosis, you’re wrong. Just today, I went hunting for someone, somewhere, who could tell me about making my own homemade pasta, and I stumbled upon Gluten-Free Girl.

You have to like a person who just has to have ravioli at 10 at night. Not only does the author of Gluten-Free Girl, Shauna James Ahern, live with celiac disease, she just plain lives. Her entry on the joys of gluten-free ravioli takes us through her repeated trips out for missing ingredients, spiced with tidbits from her life and existential meanderings, before unravelling the delicious recipe for readers.

While Ahern calls herself a “girl”, she’s a bit long in the tooth for that. Living life in her 40′s and finding that there’s more energy and more vibrancy now that she’s done with gluten, she is a prime example of how someone who begins to deal with food allergies and intolerances by removing offending ingredients from the diet, begins to thrive.

Let’s all remember that allergy is not just about avoiding ingredients. Let’s all remember that it’s also about really living. We put energy back in our lives. We put food in our bodies that nourishes us. We stop being sick.

Deprivation is a state of mind.

Which gets me back to gluten-free pasta. Much of the pasta that I’ve had lacks that certain something. The texture is a bit different – less chewy and more “dry”. It seems to miss some of the satisfaction and body of wheat pasta. While that’s not the end of the world, there are some tricks that I’ve employed to get around these qualities in the gluten-free version. I’ve had the best luck with cooking my gluten-free pasta quite el dante, or with combination pastas that make use of rice and another grain, such as quinoa.

This is why I can’t wait to try out the pasta recipe that Ahern posted to the world. Aside from the chuckles that her preceding post inspired, the recipe itself is full of the rich ingredients that I love in fresh pasta – egg and olive oil – but without the gluten.