Tomato Day this year only happened because I’m notoriously bad at reading and responding to messages. In the space of 24 hours we somehow pulled it all together. My uncle was immediately up for the challenge, and had a guy lined up by the end of the day with probably the last Romas in Australia. My mum grabbed some regular tomatoes and came straight around from work so that we could use them to clean out the machine, my cousin made early-morning plans to turn up with her baby and mum in tow, my brother drove 2.5 hours in the dark in a breaking down car, and my startled father-in-law, by chance visiting from Sydney, found himself swept up in the unstoppable momentum of Tomato Day 2023.

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!

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?

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.