Pasta et Al

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.