IF you routinely make fresh pasta, you can stop reading now. Everyone else -- probably about 99.9 percent of you -- read on.

Few things are better to eat than fresh pasta. (We're not addressing health aspects here, simply enjoyment.) Loaded with eggs, bound gently by flour, readily accepting and easily enhanced by just about any sauce you can think of from warmed olive oil with garlic or melted butter with Parmesan to the most complicated stew of shredded meat, it's incomparable.

Unfortunately, unless you live in Italy, it's probably not a part of your daily life. Most of the ''fresh'' pasta sold in stores lacks the charm of the real thing, and even most devoted home cooks consider making fresh pasta a once in a while, rainy day kind of thing, a special occasion dish rather than a reliable standby.

This changes the moment you expand your definition of fresh pasta from tagliatelle and tortellini to, well, cooked paste (which is what it literally means), a dough of flour and egg and whatever else you choose to add. (Dried pasta typically contains no egg and is only rarely made at home, even in Italy.) Because it isn't preparing the dough that makes pasta time-consuming; what takes time, effort and even precision, is rolling it out in a pasta machine and cutting it precisely. (When you get to stuffing it, you're talking about a serious project.)

But if you eliminate the machine, you've eliminated the most severe challenge. The simplest, most basic, and arguably best pasta dough is flour, salt and egg. (Within limits, the more egg the better.) This dough takes five minutes to make by hand and about 90 seconds to make in a food processor, and can be made successfully, I swear, on the first try.

If you take that basic pasta dough, you can quickly roll it out and cut it into random shapes, a process that'll take you 15 or 20 minutes. Even easier, you can take small pinches of it and drop them directly into boiling water, where it will cook like any other fresh pasta; at that point you can sauce it. Or you can pinch it directly into simmering broth to make a fast, fresh pasta soup that takes wonderfully to Parmesan. Yet another alternative is to divide the dough into three or four small balls and freeze them until they have the texture of semi-hard cheese (this takes about an hour), then grate on large holes directly into simmering water or broth.

Expand the concept of pasta a bit (and this is not cheating), and you arrive at spaetzle, the quickly made and rather thin dough (somewhat akin to savory pancake batter) that is often ''grated'' into boiling water on a spaetzle maker, a tool that looks like a grater without sharp edges. I find spaetzle makers unnervingly tricky, so I prefer to do what I've often seen done by Alsatians, for whom spaetzle is traditional: drop the batter by the spoonful into boiling water. As with all pasta, the more fragile the batter is, the lighter the result will be, so don't make it too stiff; just stiff enough to hold together.

Stretch things even further, and you arrive at the central European version of gnocchi, a raw potato dumpling. True gnocchi -- essentially mashed potatoes lightly bound by flour, with or without egg -- are not all that difficult to make, but they take time and practice. (O.K., maybe they are difficult to make. Certainly most restaurants don't even come close to the ideal.) These, which lack the elegance of gnocchi, have the advantage of being extremely quick and totally reliable: you grate raw, peeled potatoes and bind them with flour and egg. I like them best in tomato sauce but, like spaetzle, they're wonderful when browned in a pan (after boiling). The trick with these is to make sure the potatoes are cooked through; after the dumplings float to the surface, let them cook a little bit longer, then taste for doneness.

After boiling all three of these basic doughs can be treated as you would any pasta; what I've done here is provide the most basic ideas for saucing and serving. But I cannot think of an instance in which you could not use whatever sauce you prefer on ''real'' fresh egg pasta. The major difference is that these can be prepared on a hurried weeknight.

Fast Potato 'Gnocchi'
Time: 30 minutes

Salt and pepper to taste

1 pound potatoes, peeled

1 cup flour

3 eggs

1/4 cup olive oil

1 clove garlic, peeled and lightly crushed

1 28-ounce can chopped tomatoes

Freshly grated Parmesan cheese, optional.

1. Set a large pot of water to boil, and salt it. Grate or shred potatoes by hand or in a food processor. Combine with 1/2 cup flour and salt, pepper and eggs. Stir, adding enough flour to make a dough that will barely hold together when shaped with your hands.

2. Adjust heat so water simmers steadily. Make walnut-size dumplings with a spoon or your hand, and add to water. Cook for about 3 minutes after they float to surface, then taste one and make sure potato is cooked. Remove with a slotted spoon. (You can wrap or tightly cover and refrigerate these for up to a day at this point.)