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.

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.

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.