Back to work, back to school, back to classes. It’s no longer time to linger over preparing dinner during the week. Pasta fits the bill perfectly for delicious food that can be speedily cooked at the end of a busy day, and is as good to eat as it is enjoyable to cook.

It is tempting to keep half a dozen types of pasta in the cupboard – thin for delicate sauces, thick for chunky sauces, short ones for baking. This is what I usually do, and then find myself with lots of packets containing no more than a handful or so of each. Then it’s time to make minestrone, Tuscan bean and pasta soup, chick pea and pasta soup, or a mixed pasta salad.

These are all very good, but if storage space is in short supply, one of the best all-purpose pasta is spaghetti alla chitarra. It is square-cut, which helps it hold meat or fish sauce, but it is not too thick for a more delicate sauce. A good second choice is linguine, a flat, eliptical pasta, but not as broad as tagliatelle. I keep my pasta in an old-fashioned glass sweetie jar, which holds about three kilos.

There are many good brands of Italian-made dried pasta available and I have cooked good Greek-made and Swiss-made pasta, which I also recommend. In case you do not know it, let me pass on the foolproof way of cooking dried pasta that I learned in Italy years ago. It saves on fuel too.

Make a note of the cooking time given on the packet. Have your pan of boiling water and put in the pasta. Boil it for two minutes uncovered, three for very thick pasta, remove from the heat, put the lid on and leave for the full time stated on the packet. Drain and proceed in the usual way. The pasta is not off the heat long enough to cool it down.

All the Italian cooks I know are adamant about salting the water before adding the pasta, and will even taste the water to check it. I have become accustomed to cook my pasta in unsalted water and do not mind it at all. And no Italian cook of my acquaintance would dream of spoiling their beautifully cooked pasta with the contents of a jar of sauce – unless perhaps it was home-made polpo or passata.

The point of these sauces has quite passed me. Carbonara is not a sauce. It is several ingredients tossed into freshly cooked pasta, namely bits of fried pancetta, cream and raw egg. What could be quicker than that? Or chopped fresh tomatoes wilted in a little olive oil and a small handful of shredded basil leaves, black pepper and Gozo sea salt. Bottled pasta sauces are dull, flat and lifeless things, with preservatives, gums and stabilisers to keep them ‘fresh’ and bright.

Nothing could be simpler than to dress a dish of pasta for two. While the pasta is cooking, halve three ripe tomatoes and squeeze out the seeds, discarding them. Trim, slice and thoroughly rinse two leeks, and drop these into the cooking pasta about three minutes before the end of cooking.

Roughly cut up the tomato and season it with salt and pepper. Dice a cheeselet or mozzarella. Drain the pasta and leeks when cooking time is up, tip them into a large heated bowl, or back into the saucepan with some fruity olive oil. Turn the pasta in the oil, and stir in the tomato and cheese. Serve immediately, with more freshly ground black pepper, and Parmesan to grate on it.

This is a very good method for introducing vegetables to a pasta dish. Instead of leeks, you can use broccoli florets, thin green beans, rocket, baby spinach, finely sliced fennel, asparagus tips in season, and match them with appropriate flavourings and ingredients to stir in with the oil; for example, anchovies and garlic with the broccoli, shredded ham with the asparagus, pesto with the beans, smoked salmon with the fennel.

And quicker still, if you have some good gravy or sauce left over from a Sunday roast, you can make a simple and very good sauce by reheating it thoroughly and stirring it into freshly cooked and drained pasta, which you also mix with fresh basil or rocket.

You will note from the recipes below, with the exception of the baked pasta dish, that I have not indicated quantities of pasta. In Italy, it is usually eaten before a main course of fish or meat, and possibly after a plate of salumi or antipasto. There, an amount of 50g to 100g is usually judged sufficient, but even that allows for wide variation of appetite.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, pasta has become the convenience food par excellence, and most of us eat it as the main course of a meal, probably with rather too much sauce for the Italian taste. Generally, when I cook for the two of us, I divide a 500-gram pack in two, keeping the rest for another day.