Pasta et Al

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.