My Mum's Tomato, Mozzarella & Basil Pasta

You know how there are some dishes that stay with you forever? Even if you never tasted them again, you could close your eyes and imagine them exactly. For me, that kind of food is almost always tied to an occasion, or more often, a person. And more often than not, that person is my Mum.

She’s the most brilliant cook, the kind who makes it look effortless, even though we all know it isn't. I didn’t realise it at the time, but watching her swish around the kitchen, tasting and stirring, humming as she worked, I was taking it all in and learning more about cooking than I ever did working in a restaurant.

The way she’d take an unexpected lunch guest in her stride, somehow making whatever she’d planned stretch a little further. The way there would always be dessert. Sometimes something simple, sometimes something more fancy, for no particular reason other than because. The way she keeps her recipes in scrapbooks, a growing collection of treasures I pore over whenever I can. Or the way she never likes to ask exactly what time I’m coming home, as though that might be a bother for me, but I know that whenever I get there, there will be food waiting for me and now for my children, too.

She’s the kind of person who sits down at the end of each week and writes a plan for the one ahead: what everyone will eat and when. She remembers who likes what, and will quietly shape her menus around the preferences of the people she loves.

Of all the hundreds of dishes she’s cooked for me over the years, this is possibly the simplest. And maybe that’s the magic of it. We’d often have it for lunch on a summer Saturday, eating it in the garden, and I would always go back for seconds, marvelling at how just a handful of ingredients could make something so incredibly delicious.

She taught me the trick of peeling tomatoes - genuinely worth the (very little) effort involved. She would score them with a cross, dunk them in boiling water and I would peel the skins off as easily as anything. Without their skins, the tomatoes become wonderfully receptive to the flavours of the olive oil, salt and pepper, soaking them all up. The longer you can leave them the better - a few hours is ideal - but I can’t pretend I manage that on a busy weeknight. Even 20 minutes makes a difference, and if you don’t have that, I’ve got a little trick in the Notes for you.

I told her the other day just how much I love this pasta. And when I last went for lunch, guess what she made?

There are so many ways to say I love you, but through food might just be my favourite.