The answer, surprisingly, is not just to use more garlic (but you can go to town with the basil)

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How can we get a pleasingly strong garlic taste in our tomato sauce for pasta? Is the secret the amount of garlic , or how you cut it , or the length of cooking? Our sauces tend to be bland rather than zingy . The same goes for basil, in the same simple sauce – how to highlight its flavour?
Nancy, New York
I trust that’s pleasingly strong as opposed to harshly strong? If so, slow-roasting would be my initial go-to. Don’t turn on the oven just for this, though, but next time you have it on, cut the very top off a head of garlic, just to expose the cloves, drizzle over a little olive oil, then wrap in tin foil and pop it in the bottom of the oven for about 45 minutes. Remove and, once cool enough to handle, squeeze out the now amazingly soft and sweet garlic flesh, and stir it into your tomato sauce. The chains of fructose in the garlic will have broken down during roasting and given rise to something called glutamic acid, which brings with it that bold umami taste and depth we all look for in a sauce. In short, you’ll have created the most mellow but bold, sweet and pleasingly strong burst of garlicky flavour.

If you’ve not had time to roast it, it’s also fine to start with raw garlic. The more you mince it, the more the flavour compounds are released and the stronger the flavour will be, so crush or finely mince it, rather than slice it, if you want that garlic flavour really to penetrate the sauce.

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In this quick and easy midweek recipe, the cookbook author goes big on flavour – with minimal washing up

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One-pan pasta recipes can be a little hit and miss. While one pan implies you won’t need to boil the pasta separately – meaning one less item to clean up – some people find the pasta has a tendency to overcook or undercook. Others are put off by the starchiness, but I like to think of this dish as a risotto-paella-pasta situation, where the starch should be embraced and mitigated with cheesiness and acid.

You can totally add frozen corn, or even peas, to this pasta for bonus veg. Just pour some boiling water over half a cup of them while the garlic is sauteing, and wait until they thaw before adding once the pasta’s done. If you’ve got any zucchini or golden squash about, you could add these in, thinly sliced, with the burrata.

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Celebrate the freshness of a new season with ricotta gnocchi with raw pea pesto, fennel sausage penne and broccoli orecchiette

Prep 20 min
Cook 1 hr 25 min
Serves 4

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Soups and stews are what the rice-shaped pasta was made for, but it also works in salads and even some sweet dishes

What’s the best way to cook orzo?
“Orzo reminds me of being a child,” says Jacob Kenedy, chef/owner of Bocca di Lupo in London. “It’s very comforting, and you can eat it with a spoon.” It is perhaps first worth noting that in Italy the word orzo literally means “‘barley”, and the pasta we know as orzo more often goes by the name rosmarino (due to its likeness to a rosemary needle) or risoni (big rice). Here, we’re talking the pasta, which Kenedy uses as a substitute for both barley and rice, and says is particularly suited to soups and broths. For the latter, Feast’s Italian correspondent Rachel Roddy would look to Naples and a “really tasty, brothy soup with tomatoes and basil”. Gently sizzle some garlic in olive oil, then add tomatoes (“crush them with your hands”), basil and salt. Pour in water, add orzo and simmer until the pasta is soft. “Then plenty of cheese and pepper at the end, and you get this nice, thick soup.”

Orzo can also be treated like pilaf, which for Kenedy means melting a bit of butter, frying the pasta for a second, then adding “just the right amount of stock [chicken or fish] for it to absorb. That works really well.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

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Spring is here and we’re turning over new leaves

I made a light and savoury cheese pudding this week – its crust golden, its centre softly oozing. As light as a soufflé, it came from the oven in its earthenware dish, puffed and smelling sweetly of wild garlic leaves. There was a spring salad, too, this time of butterhead lettuce, peppery watercress and cucumber dressed with a mustardy vinaigrette.

Garlic leaves come in bags from the greengrocer, but some will have access to leaves growing wild. We had them in the woods where I grew up and we would pick a handful (no more) to mash into butter to melt on to lamb chops. The rest we left to grow wild, gently perfuming the woods before the bluebells appeared.

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A diced potato binds this cheesy leek and pasta dish into a delightful gluey mess

Watching any pasta shape being extruded, be that through a small domestic machine or a vast industrial one, is hypnotic. Short shapes are particularly mesmerising, because the dough – made from durum wheat flour and water – emerges at speed from the bronze or Teflon-coated die, and is then chopped to size by a rotating blade. And then there are fusilli, whose helix form is created by an ingenious die that was invented and perfected in the early 1900s. Fusilli twist their way into being, the Syd Barrett of pasta shapes, emerging from the die in a psychedelic spiral.

The fusilli shape is an old one. In her Encyclopaedia of Pasta , Oretta Zanini De Vita traces the shape back to the fruitful Arab domination of Sicily and Sardinia, and the forming of the pasta by twisting dough around a thin reed known as a bus. The habit travelled and De Vita notes that fusillo became a southern Italian dialect term for any pasta made by wrapping or pressing dough around or into a ferretto , a thin metal rod with tapered ends, known as a fuso. As you can probably imagine, shaping pasta around a slender rod (or, alternatively, a knitting needle, bicycle wheel spoke or umbrella rib) and sliding it off makes for a particular form, sometimes like scroll of paper, at others canoes or even loose ringlets, all of which are still found in southern Italy. The industrial form, meanwhile, which took decades to perfect, is a helix or spiral and has since travelled all over the world. As with all pasta, the quality of the durum wheat used, and the way it’s extruded (through bronze, which gives texture) and dried (steadily, and with great attention) has a huge effect on the taste.

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Both tantalising and restorative, zesty and creamy, this Greek take on chicken soup hits all the right notes and is perfect for Easter

Chicken soup for the soul is more than just an American self-help trope: as Carolina Doriti points out in her book Salt of the Earth , “every culture around the world has a restorative chicken soup”, from Romanian ciorba radauteana to Filipino tinolang manok . Creamy, tangy kotosoupa avgolemono is Greece’s version, and it’s “greatly healing and medicinal, and the most delicious, comforting, warming meal you will have”, according to food writer Georgina Hayden, whose Greek Cypriot family prescribes it for anyone feeling under the weather or simply run down.

Based on avgolemono, Greek cuisine’s famous egg and lemon sauce, which is a rich, bracingly sour mixture that’s often added to stews and other dishes (such as stuffed cabbage ), in the words of Rena Salaman , “its welcoming aroma always adds a bright note to a cold day, and it makes a very substantial meal by itself”. So if you’re craving sunshine but still feel in need of a little winter comfort, this is the dish for you. It also makes a lovely splash of colour at the Easter table, particularly if you’re serving chicken for the main course.

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A cheesy, mushroomy five-layer lasagne that is both sumptuous and just plain satisfying

A month ago I bought myself a stainless-steel oven tray. Not only was it the last one in the shop, but it was also the last of a size that was soon to be discontinued. Not that I needed further convincing of my need for this splendid, functional tray. It was only as I carried it home, with the bottom of the carrier bag bumping against my ankles, that it crossed my mind it might not fit in our oven.

It didn’t. And not by a fraction, either: it was as much as 30cm too long and deep enough for 10 layers of pasta. Even so, it was splendid – and I am dysmetric. I went straight back and swapped it for what I actually needed: a new but familiar 32cm x 22cm x 6cm rectangular porcelain dish for lasagne (I cracked the last one).

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Ear-shaped pasta in a roast red pepper and tomato sauce and topped with pistachios and ricotta

This dish is a happy accident. I first made it to accompany roast potatoes, with muhammara in mind (a delicious Middle Eastern dip of roast red pepper, walnuts and pomegranate molasses). But I had no walnuts, so used pistachios instead. The result is addictive and it has since become a go-to; the sauce works just as well tossed through pasta as it does with grilled prawns or roast potatoes. You could use crumbled feta instead of ricotta to top the pasta, but I like that the ricotta doesn’t compete with the flavour of the sauce.

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