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.