We had to do it. We had to make a festive season pasta. This week’s two-tone fusilli combines tomato and spinach doughs into hand-rolled twisty goodness. Served in a light nduja-spiced sauce, with crispy basil and sage leaves and cherry bocconcini, what better way to celebrate the closing out of the year? Pignolata, that’s how! To finish our dish we’ve prepared these usually sweet Christmas treats as savoury gold-coated baubles, and used them to dress our tinsel-like pasta. Because ‘tis the season.

This week we’re throwing back to the 80s! This spinach and ricotta rotolo was something that my Mum used to cook up for special occasions, back when béchamel was big. Or so I’m told. I was more a concept than a thing at the time, and I’m not sure that béchamel ever actually went out of fashion anyway, so take that as you will.

Sometimes we cook up the classics, other times we think: what would you get if you made sea anemones out of pasta, plated them into a rockpool, and made that rockpool out of margaritas? This week’s pasta is lime and tequila prawn sacchettoni, made with blue spirulina dough, and served in citrus salt enclosed pools of juniper-olive oil, dehydrated blood orange and lime, pippies, and fresh seaweed.

This week we’ve got a quick little filled pasta for you. With a simple egg dough and a spreadable roasted pistachio filling, you can stamp these little anolini out in less time than it takes your cafetière to boil. A pasta like this can be paired with just about anything, but we dropped them into some bone broth stock that we had hanging around in the freezer, for a meal of subtle but complex flavour.

This week we mixed a little nostalgia into our pasta: figs, anisette, and the lolly bowl. One of the most enduring memories that I have of my Nonna’s house is actually my Nonno’s liqueur cabinet, filled with mysterious and intricate glassware, and the intoxicating smell of anisette. Always competing for my fickle loyalty was my great aunty, who would keep a box of those rectangular Italian lollies at the ready to bribe us with. And my mum loves figs!

If there’s one pasta dish that everyone knows to mention with a wink and a nod, it’s puttanesca. This is a dish born from necessity and hard times; so keep your pantry stocked with tins and jars of long-life ingredients, and then when fresh produce is hard to find, or you can’t quite summon the will to leave the house for it, smugly whip yourself up a plate of puttanesca.

This week it’s back to our favourite type of pasta: ravioli! You might remember our spinach and ricotta recipe, from way back in the early days of our blog. That was our original family dish, but we also use to make the occasional meat or pumpkin filled variety, which is what’s inspired this week’s pasta. A simple but satisfying mix of earthy dough, creamy filling, and crispy little bits of meat!

Little Al and I were playing around with cookie cutters, making a lot of mess and noise, when we came up with this week’s shape. It’s kind of close to funghini pasta, so that’s what we’re calling it. We wanted to pair it with a rich, spicy arrabbiata sauce, and this shape allowed us to work in some two-tone laminated goodness of spinach and paprika doughs: one flavour to contrast with the sugo and one to complement. These fun guys were the result.

One of my favourite childhood dishes, that my Mum still makes when I visit, is peperonata. Ours was simply capsicums and potatoes, roasted with breadcrumbs and a good hit of olive oil: a magic combination. I’d always though that it would be fun to capture these flavours in pasta, but had never quite settled on how to do it. Do you focus on the potato or the capsicum? And then, suddenly, I remembered doppio ravioli. Perché non entrambi?

We’re regularly asked about gluten-free pasta, and to be honest the only reason that we haven’t blogged about it yet is that it feels a little too simple to put on a recipe card. Which of course is no reason at all. So this week, please accept our apologies for not posting it sooner, and enjoy our recipe for gluten-free reginette.

Pici are the answer to all of your thick, chewy pasta cravings. They’re sort an Italian equivalent to chunky hand cut rice noodles. We usually make them with just bread flour and water, but this week we’ve taken it up a notch by swapping out the water for red wine. We served them up with a chunky sauce of crispy sausage meat, fried chunks of bread, and wilted greens, for a satisfying dish loaded with texture and flavour.

Pasta handkerchiefs! Growing up, the only hankies we had in the kitchen were either worn on our heads with the corners knotted, or magicked out of nowhere by Nonna, to be spat on and ferociously applied to whatever mess I’d covered myself with. And flowers with pasta? “Why you do that for?”. But here we are, laminating flowers into pasta, and cutting them into handkerchiefs.

This week we wanted to bring you a filled pasta dish that you can knock up in less than an hour; something packed with fresh flavour, and accompanied by a sauce that you can make without a single pot or pan. These simple pansotti, filled with rainbow chard, radicchio, mustard greens, marjoram, and ricotta are what we came up with. They’re served with a delicious walnut sauce that’s made entirely with a stick blender!

One of the most common cuts of meat growing up was the trusty osso bucco. It’s an Italian classic. Along with those irresistible thin Italian sausages and finely-sliced girello, it was the reason for semi-regular hour and a half round trips to the butcher on the other side of town. You can’t trust just any old butcher with your meat. Particularly if you’re an Italian family with fiercely baseless providore allegiances.

Last week we tried to escape the mists and frosts of winter with a little touch of the seaside, but this week we’re embracing it. Or at least trudging on, bolstered by a hearty bowl of chewy wholemeal spelt gemelli. Their twisty texture and earthy flavour makes for a fortifying plate of pasta, whether it’s stirred through a hearty ragu, or tossed with a bit of butter and pepper.

Two of the clearest and most joyful memories that I have of my first visit to Italy, when I was four, are of me loudly pretending that I was being kidnapped as my dad tried to load me into the car across from the Colosseum, and sitting in the back seat of a cousin’s car as we hurtled through acres of olive trees in my nonna’s hometown of Melicuccà.

There was often a uniquely delicious smell filling my great aunty’s house when we’d drop by for a meal. This is in contrast to my poor nonna, whose penchant for boiled broad beans left her house more often than not smelling like sweaty feet. It was many years before I learned that the characteristic ingredients of my aunty’s famous pasta bake (and to be fair, my nonna’s equally famous prupettone) were in fact rather representative of southern Italian cooking in general: the humble hardboiled egg and a chunk of salami.

Sausages are fantastic; what more is there to say? They’re a self-contained, considered balance of meat, fat, and spice. I can relate. And they’re versatile: as perfect slow-cooked in a stew or sauce as they are grilled and rolled up in a slice of white bread. Think of this deliberately uncomplicated pasta sauce as a celebration of the sausage-maker and their hard work. Or at least a really quick way to make a very flavourful ragu.

This week we left the eggs in the fridge and the pasta machine in the cupboard, and made some good old flour and water casarecce. None of that fiddling around with egg to egg-yolk ratios and oil to water moisture levels; just two ingredients and our hands.

There was a time, many years ago as a young kid, when I knew the people that sold us our food. I could walk to the orchard at the end of the street for a box of fruit and veg, head off in my stroller with my nonna to collect eggs from around the corner, trade a bucket of loquats from the man two houses down.

This week’s pasta, with its paired sauce, is one big celebration of honouring your ingredients, and enjoying the histories of the dishes that you cook. With a hint of the unconventional and a touch of cultural fusion! A few weeks ago we made some tasty four cheese fagottini in beef bone broth. Whilst those little chaps owe their shape to Turkish manti, this week’s meaty sacchettoni filling takes its inspiration from them.

There’s nothing like cooking with fresh, carefully sourced ingredients, but it’s not always that easy. Sometimes you just need a dish that you can make from tins and cans and a handful of greens. This time around, as I peeked into the cupboard, I was really in the mood for beans.

Farfalle are a much maligned pasta. I suppose that they’re easy to dismiss as a bit of a novelty, little butterflies that are stocked in most supermarkets, beloved to children, comfort food to adults. Often featuring in horrid cold salads. But when I look at farfalle I see textures: smooth expanses with ruffled edges, ridged hollows that hold sauce, an extra firm pinch in the middle to contrast with the softer bite of the flat sides.

Let me tell you about my obsession with bone broth. I’ve never been particularly excited by soup, although I’d concede to the odd stew or thick blend of veggies. I certainly had no time for anything watery, and thin stocks weren’t even up for discussion. Then I discovered bone broth. This magnificent golden friend, silky and smooth to eat, wobbly like jelly when it’s set, and packed with flavour both deep and subtle at the same time.

If you want to light a fire in the pasta world, just ask someone what these little guys are called. Even the ravioli versus tortelli debate is easier to settle than this one. Manti, fagottini, ravioli, cofanetti, lanterne. Whatever you want to call them, they look great, taste fantastic, and are one of the easiest filled pastas to make.

One day, when I’m living in a whimsically decrepit villa in southern Italy, backing on to woodlands and looking down towards the ocean, I’ll grab my whittled walking stick and amble out the backdoor to collect mushrooms. There are honestly fewer things that I want more in life. But right now I’m 16,000 kilometres away and have little idea how to pick mushrooms that won’t kill me.

When we first decided to turn our little pasta tradition into a blog, posting a different pasta each week or so, I thought it would be a good idea to list out every type of pasta I could think of and make sure that we had enough weeks in us. As I approached 100 I decided we’d be fine. Then when, with a little additional research, I discovered that there are actually an estimated 350 varieties out there,, I had a little panic.

The worst kept secret of the pasta world is that for all of the incredible, complex, layered sauces out there, there is no pasta that can’t be enjoyed with just a chunk of butter and a crack of pepper. Whenever we got home especially late after school, and everyone was exhausted, it was hard to hide our delight at the suggestion of plain old pasta with butter.

This week little Al and I have invented a very special pasta for our very favourite person. We’d be lost without this lovely thing. She’s the backbone of the house, knows us better than we know ourselves, and has effortlessly become the greatest Mamma of all time. When we talk about sitting down to pasta with the family, she is the family.

The best things in life are often simple. It’s with great pleasure that we spend a whole afternoon making pasta, but with even greater pleasure that we remember the sugo to go with it will only take half an hour to make. This is our super quick and tasty tomato and basil sauce.

Little Al has managed to inherit a few of my more ‘difficult’ personality traits, but so far there’s been no sign of the calculated, scheming mischief that defined my own childhood. The prime stone against which I honed my blade of torment was my nonna. She did have pleasant diminutive nicknames for me, but my given names may as well have been ‘delinguente’ and ‘scustamato’ for their frequency and familiarity.

Slow cooked meat. Oh yeah. A surefire way to a satisfying meal is simple ingredients, cooked for a long time. And meat. I remember a couple of decades back, the last giant family party that I think we had. The kind that has so many ‘uncles’ and ‘cousins’ that you’re reminded of the fact that they’re actually placeholder titles used to avoid convoluted explanations of exactly who’s brother’s great-uncle-in-law you’re talking to, and that actually you can’t remember.

Handmade paccheri! Opinions are famously and aggressively varied as to what authentic Italian food is, and how it should be cooked. Pasta is no exception. Little Al and I value time-honoured recipes and pairings (it’s the basis of everything that we make), but we don’t believe that the love and joy of food should ever be stifled by tradition.

Here’s one that comes from the heart. This is our signature family sugo: meatballs in tomato sauce. It’s the sauce that bubbled away quietly in the background every Sunday, filling the house with delicious anticipation; it’s the sauce that simply holds everything together. In fact, when I talk about pasta and what it means to me, this is the sugo that I think of.

These days I make all kinds of pasta with all kinds of dough, but when I was a kid there were only four types. Don’t get me wrong, we enjoyed plenty of packet pasta – secretly but unanimously excited as my nonna apologised for the rigatoni she was opening – but when we did it ourselves, our repertoire was deliberately and appropriately limited.