LYDIA GERRATT

This is the pasta dish that is on every menu in those little Italian cafés that are right on the beach in Italy. It tastes phenomenal. Read through the recipe a couple of times, line up your ingredients and pans because once you start to cook, it’s fast! Though, you do get your food on the table and start eating quickly. A green lettuce salad and some wine to go with this recipe is all you need to make a perfect meal. Miraculous ingredients: fresh Scottish mussels, raw she

The flavours in this dish are incredible. Chorizo and prawns are like the best of friends, they get on so well together and the peas, well they just keep adding to the overall yumminess. It’s worth using egg tagliatelle as the texture and rich flavour are strong enough to take on the paprika released from the chorizo. My little boys scoff this pasta in 2 minutes flat. Miraculous ingredients: Unearthered chorizo de leon, Guiseppe Cocco egg tagliatelle pasta Prawn, chorizo and

This is the one - the true classic ragù Bolognese recipe created by the Queen of Italian cooking, Marcella Hazan. If you love cooking classic Italian food then you should invest in her book ‘The Essentials of Italian Cooking’, it will become the only Italian reference guide you’ll need in your kitchen. I have tried lots of different recipes for ragù over the years (everyone from Bologna seems to have their own preferred style) but Marcella’s recipe is the one that I love the

This is a truly lovely fragrant simple dish. An Italian classic. It’s brilliant when made with fresh egg pasta for a ridiculously quick lunch or I use it as a side dish instead of potatoes or rice to eat with meat (rib eye steak, tender grilled chicken or seared marinated pork fillet). I was happily surprised when I first gave my children this pasta dish when they were very little, I didn’t know if they would be keen on sage, but they loved it! Miraculous ingredient: Unsalte

This is one of those recipes that is worth keeping up your sleeve when you are all out of ideas and need to get ridiculously tasty food on the table for your hungry family. Pork ragù is like a Bolognese sauce but made with pork instead of beef and is on the table within 30 minutes. The pork makes this ragù much lighter as it naturally contains less fat than beef. Plus pork is cheaper so it’s worth trading up to free range or organic (it really does taste better) as it’s alm

I flipping love aubergines. Once grilled, baked or barbecued these purple beauties transform from a strange tasting sponge to melt-in-the-mouth creamy deliciousness. I also love instagram – it has brought me into a new world of brilliant foodies. I always thought aubergines need to be fried in lots of oil to get the best flavour, but a few Middle Eastern food instagrammers I follow grill or bake their slices of aubergine to cut down on the amount of oil. If it works for th

I’ve been trying to recreate the classic Italian porcini mushroom pasta……but, I’ve encountered one huge problem, it’s impossible to buy fresh porcini mushrooms and if by some amazing luck you find one, they are unbelievably expensive (£10 for one mushroom!!). Or, if you’re brave enough (I am definitely not) you can do a spot of mushroom foraging as, apparently, porcini do grow in British woodlands, who knew?! So what better to use than dried porcini mushrooms. You can get t

THIS is the best meal to devour on a cold January weekend with the added benefits of; everything goes into one pan (less washing up!), chicken thighs (I’m trying to do more recipes with this delicious but cheap cut of meat), huge flavour from olives, peppers, tomatoes and chicken stock, plus pasta…..little tiny orzo (so much easier to get a lot onto one forkful). The chicken thighs are first browned and then finished by cooking in the chicken stock. The poaching makes them i

This pasta sauce would normally be made in the summer when peas are in season, but when frozen peas are a million times better than fresh this dish tastes fabulous all year round. Ham with peas and cream is a classic Italian pasta sauce. Though as with all Italian recipes I found a lot of variations with the type of ham you can use. Many insist on prosciutto, but quite few use lovely chunks of fresh ham – use whatever you prefer. The whole dish is done once the pasta is coo

This pasta is simple; broccoli, lemon zest, garlic and olive oil. All these ingredients turn into a creamy tasting pasta dish even though there is no cream in sight. It’s the broccoli steam fried with olive oil that makes it taste so good. I use the normal every day broccoli as I think it is the sweetest tenderest one. Miraculous ingredients: Broccoli, extra virgin olive oil, Pennette rigate pasta, Parmigiano Reggiano (Parmesan) Penne with broccoli and lemon zest Ingredient

This is a killer recipe that has the most unbelievable tarragon flavour. It’s made with a few simple ingredients and literally takes 10 minutes to cook from start to finish. I have a tarragon plant sitting in a pot in the garden by my back door. As soon as it sprouts up, I use it in this recipe, in lots of egg dishes and in my parsley, tarragon, garlic butter recipe. Miraculous ingredients: Fresh tarragon leaves, orzo pasta, Parmigiano Reggiano (Parmesan) Orzo pasta with

Did you know it’s the prawn shells that release the savoury seafood taste which works so well with the sweetness of the prawn meat? The shells are full of the naturally occurring umami compound called glutamate. When you cook prawns, even for just a few minutes with their shells on, they take the flavour of the dish to a higher level of serious deliciousness. My best friend’s mum cooked this dish for me when I visited them in Liguria about 15 years ago. Patrizia’s family i

This pasta dish comes from Naples and apparently the story behind the saucy name, Whore’s spaghetti, is that this recipe was whipped up by the Neapolitan ‘ladies’ in between clients as it was quick to cook, super tasty and filling…… I was taught how to cook this classic dish from Campania years ago when I used to work as a Food Buyer for Waitrose and I was sent on a week long cooking trip to the South of Italy. We were based in a cooking school close to Naples, up in the hil

Every now and then I crave a light meal with killer flavours. The sharp sourness of lemon (I use a lot in this recipe), pungent garlic, aniseed tarragon and savoury parsley combined with delicate salmon flakes, peas and egg pasta does it for me. I usually double the quantities below to make enough tarragon, parsley and garlic herb butter to last for at least 6 months in the freezer. This butter is brilliant for adding flavour to any fish (I use it in the roast salmon, potat

My recipe featured in the Waitrose Weekend magazine; It’s autumn, there’s an ‘R’ in the month - now is the time to eat shellfish. Mussels are in season, they’re abundant, so delicious and best of all they are cheap. A fresh net, 1kg, is about £3.80 and will feed 2 adults and 2 children easily. I LOVE mussels. And I love that you can only buy fresh mussels during autumn and winter. It makes this dish worth waiting for. The spaghetti is cooked in the mussel liquor which cr

Have you ever come across a recipe that has been a revelation? One that has changed the way you cook and the type of meals you make there after? For me, it’s this uber simple fresh tomato sauce with basil. When I used to work as a Food Buyer for Waitrose, I was sent on a weeklong cooking trip to the South of Italy. The first dish we learnt to cook was the classic Neapolitan fresh tomato sauce for pasta. I remember thinking, really? I know how to do this, but no, I really

I remember the first time I ate pesto - it was in Milan a very long time ago. I was sitting at the kitchen table watching with slight disbelief as my friend was spooning what seemed like a tiny quantity of bright green paste into my spaghetti while trying to convince me that it was going to taste delicious. It tasted so different to anything I had eaten before and yes, I was seriously happy to eat something that good. A few years later I travelled to the home of pesto, Ligu

My other passion, apart from cooking and eating, is reading detective books. A favourite author is Timothy Holme whose detective, Achille Peroni, is the ‘Rudolph Valentino’ of the Italian police. Not only does Comissario Peroni hunt down murderers, but he is also on a quest to find the best spaghetti alle vongole that Venice has to offer. I too have been on a quest to find the best recipe to make spaghetti alle vongole as it’s surprisingly hard to get right. There are only

This is not an Italian recipe – an Australian friend cooked this pasta dish for me about 15 years ago as a tasty tummy filler before a big night out. I loved the whopping flavours from the pesto, broccoli and lots of garlic. I’ve been making this recipe ever since and I’ve used it for weaning both my little boys. I don’t usually cook with readymade pesto as I find it too acidic, but it’s perfect for this dish. The single cream dampens down any sharpness and brings out the bas

This recipe is a variation on the traditional Italian mushroom pasta - I've added a little single cream. Not so much that you feel weighed down by the richness of the dish, but just enough or comfort..... Mushrooms are a strangely more-ish ingredient full of the savoury glutamate flavour. Once you've eaten good mushroom pasta, the memory of its flavour will stay with you and every now and again, you'll crave more. I use chestnut mushrooms as they always seem denser than whi