Tabasco! It’s probably our family’s most regularly consumed condiment, and one that Little Al has recently become obsessed with. Al’s favourite is Chipotle, but we’ve gone with the classic Red Pepper for this week’s pasta. Its earthy, spicy, familiar smell somehow reminds me of my mum taking me on our regular rounds of the imported food stores when I was a kid. So, all things considered, it’s past time that we stuck it in some pasta dough.

Working on our book over this last year or so, I’ve focused on pairing more complicated pasta with simpler sauces, and vice versa. It just allows you to save a little time on one element, and use that to create something special with another.

So the dough and pasta is the focus here, although the confit purée is deceptively impressive for its simplicity – you certainly don’t have to sacrifice flavour to save time! This is our Striped Ricotta Fagottini with Garlic and Fennel Confit Purée.

We’ve been making all kinds of creative pasta lately, with unusual ingredient lists, playful dough colourings, and fiddly shapes. Well, this week we’re going back to basics, and cooking up a crowd-pleasing carbonara. To add a little Pasta et Al spin, we’ve made our tonnarelli with half rye flour, and smoked it briefly before tossing it through the sauce. It’s a creamy, cheesy, smoky smile-bringer.

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.

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.

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.

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!

This week’s dish is short and sweet, figuratively. Otherwise it’s long and savoury. Every now and then we get asked about cocoa pasta, so this week we’re sharing our go-to recipe for cocoa fettuccine, served with a mascarpone and walnut sauce, and topped with toasted buckwheat.

One of little Al’s favourite things is our weekend trip to the markets. We’ve got a routine now, that starts with a snack and a coffee – decaf macchiato for him, double espresso for me, followed by the butcher, deli, and wholefood shop, before finishing with the fruit and veggies at the grocer. Little Al talks about it all week and tells anyone who’ll listen.

This week we’re throwing back to the 80s! This spinach and ricotta rotolo was something that my Mum used to cook up for special occasions, back when béchamel was big. Or so I’m told. I was more a concept than a thing at the time, and I’m not sure that béchamel ever actually went out of fashion anyway, so take that as you will.

Sometimes we cook up the classics, other times we think: what would you get if you made sea anemones out of pasta, plated them into a rockpool, and made that rockpool out of margaritas? This week’s pasta is lime and tequila prawn sacchettoni, made with blue spirulina dough, and served in citrus salt enclosed pools of juniper-olive oil, dehydrated blood orange and lime, pippies, and fresh seaweed.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Handmade paccheri! Opinions are famously and aggressively varied as to what authentic Italian food is, and how it should be cooked. Pasta is no exception. Little Al and I value time-honoured recipes and pairings (it’s the basis of everything that we make), but we don’t believe that the love and joy of food should ever be stifled by tradition.

These days I make all kinds of pasta with all kinds of dough, but when I was a kid there were only four types. Don’t get me wrong, we enjoyed plenty of packet pasta – secretly but unanimously excited as my nonna apologised for the rigatoni she was opening – but when we did it ourselves, our repertoire was deliberately and appropriately limited.