Rachel Roddy’s recipes for store-cupboard spaghetti | A kitchen in Rome

Two speedy spaghetti-based favourites: with a quick tomato, garlic and chilli sauce, and with tinned fish, capers, chilli and lemon

“I make your coat-on almond biscuits most weeks,” a woman told me in the homeware department of John Lewis on Oxford Street, London, a few months ago. She went on to say that she also attaches the “coat-on” expression to any dish she gets going as soon as she walks through the door (and before she takes off her coat and has a pee), so thinks of me when she makes coat-on lentils, coat-on rice and leeks, coat-on tomato sauce, coat-on couscous with roast vegetables. As much as I wanted to keep the compliment to myself and not share it, I did remind her that I had borrowed the expression from Nigella Lawson and her book How to Eat, to which the woman replied: “What a generous food writer you are.” I thanked her back, complimented her on her blue jacket, then bounced all the way to the cash desk to pay for the dishcloths and potato peeler, and then all along Oxford Street.

If I ever see that woman again, I need to tell her that, since our meeting, I have also been attaching the prefix “coat-on” to various dishes and actions, not least boiling the kettle to jumpstart the water for coat-on spaghetti. Coincidentally, it is 20 years since I moved to Rome; 19 and a half years since Vincenzo and I first argued about how to cook pasta (him telling me I used too little water and salt, and took too much time; me telling him he was supercilious and boring); and 10 years since I first wrote about spaghetti for this column. Some things have changed, others have not (salt), and I now have a medium-sized repertoire of coat-on spaghettis.