The past few years have been a wild, generally unpleasant family ride through chronic health issues, and we’re still just doing what we can to hang in there. Gluten-free is easy enough, and we’ve had great success adapting everything to GF (as you would have noticed in recent posts), and dairy-free is not too hard either (choking back your tears at not being able to drink grated pecorino straight from the bag when no one’s looking). But grain-free is a little trickier… So we’ve made things easier for ourselves by adding these gnocchi into regular rotation!

The Italian-Australian experience, and all that it brings with it, is really the only ‘Italian’ that I’ve ever known. My brother and I grew up with an Italian mum (first-generation Australian) and an English-Australian dad, spending most of our early years in the care of a thoroughly Calabrian Nonna who arrived in that rich 50s boom. To this day, the only Italian that sounds right to me is her comfortable, lazy southern drawl, and the only Italian-English accent that makes sense comes from that same familiar dialect.

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?

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.