Nuts and brassicas.

Yeah, I had to read it twice as well. Some headlines do that to you.

Pasta with walnuts and broccoli.

Something to do with flavour or texture or both. Nuts go with members of the brassica family and if you underscore that pairing with something warm and bland and homely, like traditional home-made pasta, and bind it with a compatible fat - cream or cheese or both - you have the makings of a great dish.

Hence the following:

Cook the pasta. Rigatoni is my fallback when discrete components appear in the sauce, but for this I used farfalle, usually incorrectly translated as bowties for the obvious reason, but when you know it means butterflies, you will never again look upon a pack of them in a shop as an item of men's clothing.

Meanwhile, cook a finely chopped onion and a clove of garlic in some olive oil in a shallow non-stick pan. Then add half a cup of white wine, the same amount of cream, and a shower of walnuts. Stir and reduce.

When the pasta is almost cooked, throw in enough broccoli florets to populate each serving dish with about half a dozen. When just tender, drain the lot. Place in serving bowls, pour over walnut cream sauce. Add crumbled blue cheese if desired.

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Serve the old-fashioned way saying Grace before Meals, if anyone remembers that, and add a prayer for those poor souls trapped under crumbled fourteenth-century buildings in Italy.