I could eat pesto until my hair turned green. It has everything that good eating should have – the freshness of the season, through the basil, the pungency of the garlic, the twists and depths of flavour of the olive oil and the Parmesan, the chunky texture of the nuts, and the romance of thousands of years and millions of hands making it, loving it.

I remember when scallops were so plentiful you would buy them in batter from your local fish’n'chippery; when they used bulldozers to get into the piles of them at the market (now they use tongs); when they were the cheapest of cheap. They were the affordable shellfish. Not any more.

Red peppers are not red peppers until they have been roasted and had their blistered skins removed. Then they are as different from the unskinned version as autumn apples are from those of spring – ‘fresh’ from the cool store.
The roasting process concentrates the flavours marvellously, compressing what is already something pretty special into something [...]

The thick tomato sauce from the previous recipe has plenty of uses, especially if you don’t drown the pasta with it. Just let it hold on to the ribbons or curls or whatever. I have found it particularly attractive when faced with leftover hot dogs or frankfurters after one of the kids’ birthday parties. It’s [...]

In superior times, specifically those times when running a restaurant was my life, it was not seen to be de rigeur to have anything to do with the dried form of pasta. Not that there was anything absolutely wrong with such a thing – more it was to do with effort being seen to be made.

Time tends to fog the minute details of visits to the great cities of the world. Thus anything that has happened to me in Paris or New York or Rome or Florence turns into one of life’s greatest moments. Which means the tagliatelle alia vongole I took at a tiny trattoria just outside the Santa [...]

One thing to remember about great Italian cooking is that there is nothing over the top about it. No tricks of presentation – no sprigs of parsley here, nor judiciously laid leaves of chervil there – just readily available, simple flavours, cooked with gusto, spirit and plenty of love. Love for the raw ingredients, love [...]

Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to show off with it, and when you show off, it usually means you spend money. That means seafood. Prawns and scallops are just wonderful tossed through simple buttered noodles, and they take a quantum leap into glory when you douse them with spices, hit them in a red-hot [...]