Pasta that looks like beans! This week’s capunti are made with a classic flour and water dough; no pasta sheets, no filling, just hand-shaped pods of goodness. You might remember that way back we made casarecce and pici with similar doughs. Like them, the lack of egg in our capunti makes for a creamy, smooth texture. Poke a few little hollows in the middle to catch the sauce, and you’ve got a simple and tasty little pasta.

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.

This week’s dish is short and sweet, figuratively. Otherwise it’s long and savoury. Every now and then we get asked about cocoa pasta, so this week we’re sharing our go-to recipe for cocoa fettuccine, served with a mascarpone and walnut sauce, and topped with toasted buckwheat.

One of little Al’s favourite things is our weekend trip to the markets. We’ve got a routine now, that starts with a snack and a coffee – decaf macchiato for him, double espresso for me, followed by the butcher, deli, and wholefood shop, before finishing with the fruit and veggies at the grocer. Little Al talks about it all week and tells anyone who’ll listen.

The best things in life are often simple. It’s with great pleasure that we spend a whole afternoon making pasta, but with even greater pleasure that we remember the sugo to go with it will only take half an hour to make. This is our super quick and tasty tomato and basil sauce.

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.