It’s been far too long since we’ve pulled a real Pasta et Al move! I’ve always wanted to put American mustard inside pasta, and I love any opportunity to provoke purists, so this week we are taking the flavours of the ubiquitously fantastic cheeseburger, and stuffing them into fagottini.

Our pasta is bobbing around in a tomato and bacon broth, with pickle juice stirred through. And our sesame seed dough is filled with a neat stack of American red cheddar, ketchup made from the strained broth tomatoes, mustard, and a mini beef hamburger patty containing the bacon from the broth.

You’d know by now that Pasta et Al is all about mindful food. We source locally and seasonally, and buy all things grass-fed, free-range, unpackaged, and covered in soil. And when we’re not making pasta, we grow things, ferment things, jar things, and spend a lot of our time talking about things like permaculture, aquaponics, silvopasture, microbiomes, and regenerative agriculture. We’re a little bunch of passionate food-loving nerds, and this week we’re delighted to introduce our equally passionate regen ag friends at Dirty Clean Food.

Tabasco! It’s probably our family’s most regularly consumed condiment, and one that Little Al has recently become obsessed with. Al’s favourite is Chipotle, but we’ve gone with the classic Red Pepper for this week’s pasta. Its earthy, spicy, familiar smell somehow reminds me of my mum taking me on our regular rounds of the imported food stores when I was a kid. So, all things considered, it’s past time that we stuck it in some pasta dough.

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’s pasta is a little something special that we put together for Mutti. Simple but delicious cavatelli, served in a quick sugo, and topped with fresh ricotta salata, pine nuts, and lemon zest. For when you’re in a hurry, but still want to impress!

Ah, rigatoni. For all of the incredible shapes and fillings out there, all of the carefully handcrafted pasta that we obsess over, there’s just something indescribably special about these chewy, ridged, extruded tubes. Even as a kid, I remember secretly hanging out for the dried supermarket rigatoni, despite always having a freezer full of fresh pasta. A big bowl of rigatoni with thick tomato sauce and a huge mound of grated cheese can fix just about anything.

Tomato day. This week it’s something so exciting and close to my heart that it was hard knowing where to start. In fact, it’s so deeply enmeshed with who I am that I juggled joy and a hard lump in my throat as I tried to put it into words. After almost two decades, we’re bringing back tomato day!

As much as we love a light pasta dish, there is something incomparably comforting about a slow-cooked, thick tomato sauce. It’s been a while since we featured a good old ragu, so this week we’re cooking up a pot of short ribs. Nothing tricky, nothing fancy, just a nice long sit in the oven.

This week we’re throwing back to the 80s! This spinach and ricotta rotolo was something that my Mum used to cook up for special occasions, back when béchamel was big. Or so I’m told. I was more a concept than a thing at the time, and I’m not sure that béchamel ever actually went out of fashion anyway, so take that as you will.

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.