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.

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.

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.

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.

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.