Pasta et Al

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.

My Ma used to whip up a great beef steak ragu every now and then, nice and simple, with tomatoes and olives. We’d often lift the steak out at the end and eat it with a salad, stirring the sauce through our pasta. I’d forgotten about this little gem of a dish for years, but it recently came to me out of the blue, and so naturally we decided to dream up a Pasta et Al version.

The Italian-Australian experience, and all that it brings with it, is really the only ‘Italian’ that I’ve ever known. My brother and I grew up with an Italian mum (first-generation Australian) and an English-Australian dad, spending most of our early years in the care of a thoroughly Calabrian Nonna who arrived in that rich 50s boom. To this day, the only Italian that sounds right to me is her comfortable, lazy southern drawl, and the only Italian-English accent that makes sense comes from that same familiar dialect.

We couldn’t let Valentine’s Day coincide with pasta day without creating something a bit special for our favourite person. My long-suffering better half, little Al’s lovely Ma, is the genius cake-extraordinaire behind Forty-Two Cakes. So as a little tribute to her, we’ve taken cake flavours and turned them into pasta!