Pasta with Romano pepper, courgette and black olive sauce is a recipe from Sicily perfect for hot weather; easily digested. It’s a lactovegetarian sauce dripping with the additional flavours of onions, basil, white wine, oregano and ricotta—and a kick of peperoncini if you like your Sicilian spicy. But, it is often served with the addition of pancetta cubes if you want a little meat. Though it’s best slow-cooked, it remains very easy to make.

This linguine with crab, peas and lemon, and more besides, is the perfect dish for hot weather. With its notes of fresh herbs and healthy ingredients, it's fully satisfying yet easily digested. And, it is also both quick and easy to make when temperatures mean the last thing you want is to spend time slaving over a hot stove.

My father chanced upon this spicy Sicilian spaghetti with scallops in Palermo in the 1960s and it's been a family favourite ever since. It's brimming with flavours—scallops, anchovies, peperoncino, capers, shallots, and more—but takes less than 30 minutes to make. Above all, good quality olive oil is the star. It's a healthy, easy option perfect for hot weather.

This recipe for pasta with kale and pancetta sauce comes from Castelfranco Emelia in Italy's Modena Province. It's a combination of the deeper flavours of onions cooked in white wine, pancetta and cream and the green flavours of kale and basil. Given its particular cooking method, it can be turned into a lactovegetarian dish with no effort at all.

This recipe for pasta with pumpkin, spinach and thyme sauce takes barely 30 minutes to prepare and is surprisingly delicious for something that is so easy to cook with relatively few ingredients. Ideal for when you need to pull something impressive together with little time on your hands.

This recipe for Sicilian casarecce with caper and anchovy tomato sauce is simplicity itself with few ingredients, healthy and delicious. All it takes is a little time to cook down to perfection. It's from one of my father's journals of recipes he collected on his travels in the 1960s and 1970s.

A recipe for pasta with creamy sweet pepper and pancetta sauce with notes of fresh basil from Genoa. It is simple and fairly quick to make, but delivers way beyond expectations if you pay attention to a few small details.

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

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.

A Roman classic, this kosher version of iconic carbonara, is a traditional recipe born in the Ghetto di Roma.

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 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