A pared back pasta dinner and travel hits

What should we cook this weekend? What about a rich chicken ragu tossed through rigatoni and a jar of biscotti. Plus a travel highlights reel.

Chicken and rosemary ragu with rigatoni

A simple, crunchy salad

Hazelnut and chocolate biscotti

I’m just home from a couple of weeks in Italy and have thoughts. Mostly, and appropriately, about pasta.

I’ve been lucky to spend a bit of time in this country (a few years living in Piedmont in my late twenties and a few trips back since then), and in my experience, (and in general), Italian cooks do not feel the need to overcomplicate, garnish, fiddle or overload their tables with multiple options. Instead, they let one or two excellent dishes do the talking. They layer flavours carefully with practised recipes and use the best ingredients the season has to offer.

On the other hand, I often feel like I go overboard when entertaining. I worry that ‘just’ serving up a risotto or pasta somehow isn’t fancy enough. Or enough. But that’s rubbish.

Firstly, because when we have our people over, just being together over a meal is more than enough. A bowl of pasta is enough. Of course it is. We’re lucky to have that. And if the people at our tables judge us for that, then perhaps they’re not our people.

Anyhoo…. Here is a menu that is more than enough. It’s not going to ask you to spend all day cooking. It’s going to make everyone happy and be easy to eat, share and serve. It’s going to make you feel good as the cook because everything but the cooking of the pasta is done well in advance. The kitchen won’t look like a bomb has gone off right about dinner time; you’ll just have your sauce bubbling away on the stove, the biscotti ready to tip into a bowl, and your salad ready to toss.

Happy in the kitchen and at the table – that’s what I want this menu to make you feel. Let’s make it this weekend. I’ve already got my sauce and biscotti done (thanks to needing photos for this post), and this weekend I’m going to bring both out for a nice little wintery dinner party. We’ll light the candles, dim the lights, play some good tunes and pour the red.

Thank you for being here,

Sophie x

Rich chicken ragu with rigatoni

This sauce is a rich tomato, garlic and rosemary base that we cook the chicken pieces in slowly, then shred from the bone and toss with a short pasta. It’s so good. I pulled it from a lasagne recipe shared on my Insta a couple of years ago, and while it does shine there (with layers of fresh pasta, spinach béchamel and a pine nut crumb) in the spirit of this newsletter, of flying the flag for keeping things simple, I think it’s more than enough tossed through pasta on its own.