Spaghetti with Eggs, Pancetta and Pecorino Romano
Spaghetti alla Carbonara

I love recipes that require just a few good-quality ingredients and are simple to make yet really have the ‘wow factor’, such as this pasta dish with mussels. You don’t have to use the bottarga - the dish stands alone without it - but a Sardinian cook would almost certainly grate it over the top of the finished dish.

Meat, meat and more meat – I love this pizza. The use of three different hams with cheese is delicious. Making that first cut into the pizza and enjoying all the flavours oozing out is worth any amount of time you spent preparing it. Picture after a hard day’s work eating this dish with a large glass of red wine – it’s the perfect ending to any day. If you prefer, add in mozzarella to get that...

Asparagus is one of the great delicacies of the vegetable world, and my asparagus tartlets quite rightly make it centre of attention. It is cooked very briefly, then plunged into cold water to retain its texture and bright green colour. You can use pecorino cheese rather than Parmesan if you like a saltier flavour.

If you need to make dinner in under four minutes, this is the recipe for you. It is so easy, you really won’t believe it. Once you have blended the ingredients together, that’s pretty much job done – it smells amazing too. You coat the fish and there you have it – ready to be cooked. You can cook it there and then or even prepare in the morning and cook.

If I asked you to name one Italian dessert , I guarantee the vast majority would say tiramisu. However, not everybody likes the coffee that the biscuits are traditionally soaked in, so my version – inspired by a trip to the cherry orchards of Castello, where Ciro and his family grow wonderful fruit – uses liqueur instead. If making this for children, just leave out the booze and cook the cherries...

If you ever have the chance to visit the town where I was born, Torre del Greco, you will soon realise that every restaurant in town serves this dish. Southern Italian people, me included, are absolutely crazy about tuna. If you try to translate ‘tonno scue’ scue’ into English, it would be ‘tuna made with no effort’. The reason it is called this is because the few ingredients used are put...