While I had been picking cherries, Anna had prepared the pasta. Piles of hand-cut ribbons of linguine shaped into mounds nestled against each other. I knew by the ribbons’ pale hint of yellow, our Leghorn flock had been scratching through the fallow field, smothered in clover and dandelion. Clover and dandelion flowers turned the yolks to dark yellow. But once incorporated with the flour and salt, the colour faded, lightly darkening the dough.

Datterini, mini oval-shaped tomatoes from Sicily, still attached to their thin and brittle, pungent-smelling vines, lay clumped together.

– Excerpt from Love Me Not, by Jacqueline Falcomer