Pasta et Al

Selamat pagi para pemasak dan para pecinta makanan! This week we’ve crafted something extra special and delightfully different, a fusion of cuisines that is particularly close to my heart. And is quite possibly one of the tastiest things that I’ve ever cooked! My roots might be in Italy, and my home in Australia, but Indonesia is where I really grew into myself. So I’m very excited to present our latest creation: fagottini made with cassava leaf dough and cooked as potstickers, filled with slow-cooked beef rendang, and served with green sambal, chilli eggplant, and toasted coconut.

Ah, rigatoni. For all of the incredible shapes and fillings out there, all of the carefully handcrafted pasta that we obsess over, there’s just something indescribably special about these chewy, ridged, extruded tubes. Even as a kid, I remember secretly hanging out for the dried supermarket rigatoni, despite always having a freezer full of fresh pasta. A big bowl of rigatoni with thick tomato sauce and a huge mound of grated cheese can fix just about anything.

Back before parenthood and pandemic, when we were able to fly around the world, or jump in the car on a whim and just drive, I’d get to the ocean as often as I could. For a while there I was diving almost every weekend, and became quicker at jumping into a wetsuit and slinging on a tank than pulling on my socks and shoes.

It’s time to go back to basics, and it doesn’t get much simpler than flour, water, and onions. This week we’re tapping into our roots with the perfectly imperfect Calabrese fileja. Although we make all kinds of pasta these days, and tend to use egg doughs more often than not, a lot of the pasta that we made and ate growing up was just flour and water. In fact, most of the food that we enjoyed was really cucina povera, imported to Australia relatively unchanged from how it was cooked by generations before us back in Italy. For me, something about that connection always makes these dishes a little special.

Some Sundays I wake up and know exactly what type of pasta I want to make. Other times it takes a strong coffee and a rummage through the fridge. This weekend though my inspiration had run dry. Life’s been busy and days have been long. I’ve just been trying to get up that great big hill of hope for a destination. It’s time for a little healing nostalgia. This week we’re serving up 90s print triangoli.

Pasta that looks like beans! This week’s capunti are made with a classic flour and water dough; no pasta sheets, no filling, just hand-shaped pods of goodness. You might remember that way back we made casarecce and pici with similar doughs. Like them, the lack of egg in our capunti makes for a creamy, smooth texture. Poke a few little hollows in the middle to catch the sauce, and you’ve got a simple and tasty little pasta.

We’re finally, reluctantly, ready to accept that the temperature’s cooling down for another year. At least where we are. And that means it’s time for some seasonal pasta. This week we’ve got beetroot-striped beef-filled cappelletti sitting on top of a thick white bean and roasted garlic purée, with some cute roasted baby root vegetables to accompany them. It’s roast-themed pasta! And it’s actually, seriously, delicious.

This week we’re bringing you a family classic, a simple and delicious dish that was on regular rotation when I was a kid. Tuna and capsicum pasta can be as straightforward as a couple of capsicums, a tin of tuna, and some dried pasta. Despite this simplicity, or perhaps because of it, it makes for an unexpectedly satisfying meal and a perfect option for a quick dinner.

Tomato day. This week it’s something so exciting and close to my heart that it was hard knowing where to start. In fact, it’s so deeply enmeshed with who I am that I juggled joy and a hard lump in my throat as I tried to put it into words. After almost two decades, we’re bringing back tomato day!

As much as we love a light pasta dish, there is something incomparably comforting about a slow-cooked, thick tomato sauce. It’s been a while since we featured a good old ragu, so this week we’re cooking up a pot of short ribs. Nothing tricky, nothing fancy, just a nice long sit in the oven.