This is a super simple, super tasty little dish which you can prep beforehand and then, after cooking the pasta, assemble at the last minute.

Ingredients

3 red peppers (you can also use an orange or yellow one but the red adds a good colour; don’t use green peppers)

75g walnuts, lighted toasted

1 garlic clove mashed

1 tablespoon of pomegranate molasses (nice but not essential, I’ve made it without)

zest of one lemon

20g parmesan

pinch chilli flakes

25g chopped flat leaf parsley

four tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil

300g pasta – linguini or tagliatelle are a good shape here

Method

You need to roast the peppers for 30 minutes at 220C, and you can do this bit the day before or earlier in the day. Once roasted and cool, skin, de-seed and finely chop the peppers. As you can probably see from my pic, I chop mine very inaccurately and have tiny pieces and sometimes the odd larger piece. It is better if you take the time to really chop the pepper quite finely – so don’t be like me.

I’ve often thought about keeping the juice the peppers exude and mixing it into the pasta later, lessening the amount of oil, but confess I’ve yet to do it because I forget.

If you haven’t already, lightly toast the walnuts for five minutes but watch carefully because we know how readily nuts burn. Finely chop these too.

Once the peppers are all cooled and de-seeded and chopped, you can add in the rest of the sauce ingredients – which is basically all of the rest of the ingredients above save for the pasta. What I tend to do is do the peppers and walnuts and assemble the rest just before dinner time.

But whichever you do, at some point, you need to mix together the other ingredients to make the sauce and then season it. I forget to season something and it’s also okay. The chilli flakes lift it but I add those over the plate as my children don’t like them.

Cook the pasta, or have it cooking whilst you mix together the sauce. Then when the pasta is ready, drain, plonk into a big serving bowl and put the pepper sauce on top. Serve with extra parmesan/chilli flakes if you like. Voila.