This dish of pasta with celery and basil sauce, served here with broad beans, is an amalgam of a fondly remembered dish from childhood via what happens when you start nosing around in the British Library. Highfalutin bibliographic japes aside, it's also easy to cook.

This pasta with creamy asparagus and smoked salmon is one of my favourite summer dishes for when you're hungry but want something a little refreshing. It's certainly filling, but it is also light with the flavours of warm weather; citrus and green things. Better still, it takes very little effort to cook.

Bucatini with butternut squash, bacon and sage is a dish that is easy to whip up with very little effort.

Pasta with prawn and anchovy cream sauce

This Ligurian pasta with mushrooms, capers and walnuts and other ingredients; ready in under 30 minutes; vegan, vegetarian or other

This recipe for pasta in a Roman-style cream sauce with peas, broad beans and spinach is incredibly quick and easy; perfect for summer

Tagliatelle with sausage ragù is an authentic Bolognese favourite; also a hack for those who find it hard to get their hands on salsiccia

A low-fat pasta of roasted butternut and walnut pesto, with garlic and parsley, combined with mushrooms

Tuscan pasta with fennel —and sausage for those who eat meat—is another dish that can be readily be vegetarian or not.

An easy, quick dish, this healthy Calabrian pasta with seafood has little kick of chilli and healthy pescatarian proteins

Bucatini with king prawns and a magical sauce of three forms of tomato—hence "Il tricorno" ("the three-cornered hat") —and dried basil.

Pasta with salsiccia, butternut squash and cavolo nero is an easy winter warmer

Apulian pasta with tomato sauce and 'nduja. The other lead flavours in the sauce include capers, black olives and red peppers.

Sicilian spaghetti with chillies, sultanas and anchovies

A creamy Neapolitan pasta, this lacto-vegetarian dish with fennel, red peppers and celery was just of one of many dishes my father...

A Calabrian linguine, a healthy combination of pasta with with tomato sauce, summer greens, citrus, and anchovies

A pasta dish perfect for summer brimming with the flavours of green summer vegetables and the zing of lemon. The white fish makes it...

A spicy Calabrian spaghetti dish with smoked mussels, mushrooms, green peas and a pesto with the kick of red chillies.

A version of the first sauce my father taught me to cook. Smokiness and freshness are the key features of this classic Italian pasta dish

A great pasta dish— "paccheri con zucca, asparagi e capesante"—otherwise know as paccheri with butternut squash, asparagus and scallops