The best things in life are often simple. It’s with great pleasure that we spend a whole afternoon making pasta, but with even greater pleasure that we remember the sugo to go with it will only take half an hour to make. This is our super quick and tasty tomato and basil sauce.

Little Al has managed to inherit a few of my more ‘difficult’ personality traits, but so far there’s been no sign of the calculated, scheming mischief that defined my own childhood. The prime stone against which I honed my blade of torment was my nonna. She did have pleasant diminutive nicknames for me, but my given names may as well have been ‘delinguente’ and ‘scustamato’ for their frequency and familiarity.

Slow cooked meat. Oh yeah. A surefire way to a satisfying meal is simple ingredients, cooked for a long time. And meat. I remember a couple of decades back, the last giant family party that I think we had. The kind that has so many ‘uncles’ and ‘cousins’ that you’re reminded of the fact that they’re actually placeholder titles used to avoid convoluted explanations of exactly who’s brother’s great-uncle-in-law you’re talking to, and that actually you can’t remember.

Handmade paccheri! Opinions are famously and aggressively varied as to what authentic Italian food is, and how it should be cooked. Pasta is no exception. Little Al and I value time-honoured recipes and pairings (it’s the basis of everything that we make), but we don’t believe that the love and joy of food should ever be stifled by tradition.

Here’s one that comes from the heart. This is our signature family sugo: meatballs in tomato sauce. It’s the sauce that bubbled away quietly in the background every Sunday, filling the house with delicious anticipation; it’s the sauce that simply holds everything together. In fact, when I talk about pasta and what it means to me, this is the sugo that I think of.

These days I make all kinds of pasta with all kinds of dough, but when I was a kid there were only four types. Don’t get me wrong, we enjoyed plenty of packet pasta – secretly but unanimously excited as my nonna apologised for the rigatoni she was opening – but when we did it ourselves, our repertoire was deliberately and appropriately limited.