Celebrate the freshness of a new season with ricotta gnocchi with raw pea pesto, fennel sausage penne and broccoli orecchiette Prep 20 min Cook 1 hr 25 min Serves 4 ..read more

Soups and stews are what the rice-shaped pasta was made for, but it also works in salads and even some sweet dishes What’s the best way to cook orzo?“Orzo reminds me of being a child,” says Jacob Kenedy, chef/owner of Bocca di Lupo in London. “It’s very comforting, and you can eat it with a spoon.” It is perhaps first worth noting that in Italy the word orzo literally means “‘barley”, and the pasta we know as orzo more often goes by the name rosmarino (due to its likeness to a rosemary needle) or risoni (big rice). Here, we’re talking the pasta, which Kenedy uses as a substitute for both barle ..read more

Spring is here and we’re turning over new leaves I made a light and savoury cheese pudding this week – its crust golden, its centre softly oozing. As light as a soufflé, it came from the oven in its earthenware dish, puffed and smelling sweetly of wild garlic leaves. There was a spring salad, too, this time of butterhead lettuce, peppery watercress and cucumber dressed with a mustardy vinaigrette. Garlic leaves come in bags from the greengrocer, but some will have access to leaves growing wild. We had them in the woods where I grew up and we would pick a handful (no more) to mash into butter t ..read more

Walnuts get a starring role in this pasta dish with a (sort of) bread sauce The walnut is a nut I regularly enjoy, but until now I’d never used it in a meal as a hero ingredient. Then I read about Ligurian salsa di noci and it caught my attention because it sounded like a garlicky, walnutty bread sauce. Now, I really love bread sauce, and ever since I made Delia’s circa 1999, I’ve been wondering how I could eat more of it with my main meals. Without wanting to offend the Italians, or the Brits, this is not bread sauce: it is silkier and nuttier, and it is beautiful mixed with twisted trofie pa ..read more

See in the new season Italian-style: lemon sole with spring vegetables and a sweet-sour dressing, and orecchiette with broccoli, anchovy and cumin Spring took rather a long time to arrive this year. Consequently, I’m planning to go all out on green veg at every opportunity from here on in. Five shades of green in just one dish (or six, if you include the grassy-green olive oil)? This is just me and my cravings starting out and trusting that everyone else is as ready as I am for something lighter, not to mention light-filled. Serve everything with a green salad, drink green lime and soda, and s ..read more

A diced potato binds this cheesy leek and pasta dish into a delightful gluey mess Watching any pasta shape being extruded, be that through a small domestic machine or a vast industrial one, is hypnotic. Short shapes are particularly mesmerising, because the dough – made from durum wheat flour and water – emerges at speed from the bronze or Teflon-coated die, and is then chopped to size by a rotating blade. And then there are fusilli, whose helix form is created by an ingenious die that was invented and perfected in the early 1900s. Fusilli twist their way into being, the Syd Barrett of pasta ..read more

Both tantalising and restorative, zesty and creamy, this Greek take on chicken soup hits all the right notes and is perfect for Easter Chicken soup for the soul is more than just an American self-help trope: as Carolina Doriti points out in her book Salt of the Earth, “every culture around the world has a restorative chicken soup”, from Romanian ciorba radauteana to Filipino tinolang manok. Creamy, tangy kotosoupa avgolemono is Greece’s version, and it’s “greatly healing and medicinal, and the most delicious, comforting, warming meal you will have”, according to food writer Georgina Hayden, wh ..read more

A cheesy, mushroomy five-layer lasagne that is both sumptuous and just plain satisfying A month ago I bought myself a stainless-steel oven tray. Not only was it the last one in the shop, but it was also the last of a size that was soon to be discontinued. Not that I needed further convincing of my need for this splendid, functional tray. It was only as I carried it home, with the bottom of the carrier bag bumping against my ankles, that it crossed my mind it might not fit in our oven. It didn’t. And not by a fraction, either: it was as much as 30cm too long and deep enough for 10 layers of pas ..read more

Ear-shaped pasta in a roast red pepper and tomato sauce and topped with pistachios and ricotta This dish is a happy accident. I first made it to accompany roast potatoes, with muhammara in mind (a delicious Middle Eastern dip of roast red pepper, walnuts and pomegranate molasses). But I had no walnuts, so used pistachios instead. The result is addictive and the sauce has since become a go-to; it works just as well tossed through pasta as it does with grilled prawns or roast potatoes. You could use crumbled feta instead of ricotta to top the pasta, but I like that the ricotta doesn’t compete wi ..read more

A thrifty yet irresistible Neapolitan dish of tomatoes, nuts, raisins, capers and olives, all sweated down in lots of olive oil and tossed through a tangle of spaghetti ’E Curti is a small, very good osteria in a town called Sant’Anastasia, which is perched on the slopes of Vesuvius about 13km north-east of Naples. We made a detour and stopped there two summers ago, thanks to the trusty Slow Food osteria guide (although no thanks to my navigating). One of the specialities at ’E Curti is spaghetti with dried nuts and fruit, capers, olives, herbs and a local variety of tomatoes called pomodori p ..read more