Pasta, for me, has always been more about an approach to food than a favourite dish. Don’t get me wrong, we make and enjoy it at least once a week, and it is a passion bordering on obsession, but tacos truly vie for my heart. Or my stomach, as it may be. It was only a matter of time before we quite literally stuffed some Mexican into our pasta.

A couple of weeks back I was enjoying a good glass of Montepulciano with a light pork ragu and a side of charred radicchio. How far I’ve come from Fruity Lexia and chip rolls. Anyway, I’d paired it so uncharacteristically well that it occurred to me I should probably stick it all into some sort of tortelli. And so this weekend’s pasta turned out to be a little ode to wine, pairing the dish to the vino, rather than the other way around. This is our pork and radicchio tortelli, made with a red wine dough, and served simply with smashed garlic fried in olive oil.

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.

Slow cooked meat. Oh yeah. A surefire way to a satisfying meal is simple ingredients, cooked for a long time. And meat. I remember a couple of decades back, the last giant family party that I think we had. The kind that has so many ‘uncles’ and ‘cousins’ that you’re reminded of the fact that they’re actually placeholder titles used to avoid convoluted explanations of exactly who’s brother’s great-uncle-in-law you’re talking to, and that actually you can’t remember.

Here’s one that comes from the heart. This is our signature family sugo: meatballs in tomato sauce. It’s the sauce that bubbled away quietly in the background every Sunday, filling the house with delicious anticipation; it’s the sauce that simply holds everything together. In fact, when I talk about pasta and what it means to me, this is the sugo that I think of.