It’s time to go back to basics, and it doesn’t get much simpler than flour, water, and onions. This week we’re tapping into our roots with the perfectly imperfect Calabrese fileja. Although we make all kinds of pasta these days, and tend to use egg doughs more often than not, a lot of the pasta that we made and ate growing up was just flour and water. In fact, most of the food that we enjoyed was really cucina povera, imported to Australia relatively unchanged from how it was cooked by generations before us back in Italy. For me, something about that connection always makes these dishes a little special.

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.

One of the most common cuts of meat growing up was the trusty osso bucco. It’s an Italian classic. Along with those irresistible thin Italian sausages and finely-sliced girello, it was the reason for semi-regular hour and a half round trips to the butcher on the other side of town. You can’t trust just any old butcher with your meat. Particularly if you’re an Italian family with fiercely baseless providore allegiances.