Italian food makes for fantastic, cheap, easy midweek meals and this recipe for orzo pasta with Parmesan cheese and butter symbolises everything good about this most versatile of cuisines.

We eat this dish quite a lot when the cupboards are otherwise bare and we only want to spend a few minutes cooking.

The recipe is devilishly simple. Allow 100g of dried orzo pasta per person. Bring to the boil in a pot of salted water (be generous with the salt!) and weigh out approximately 10g of butter. It’s important to use real butter here rather than any healthy alternatives!

After weighing out the butter, weigh out around 50g of Parmesan cheese. Just a quick note at this stage that the measurements here for butter and cheese are based on making enough for two people.

Once the pasta has cooked through, which doesn’t take long at all, drain it and leave it on the side for a minute or two. You don’t want the pasta to be too hot when you stir through the other ingredients.

Put the pasta back in the pan but leave it off the heat. Stir in the butter and the Parmesan cheese, letting these tasty ingredients melt into the warm pasta. Keep stirring until everything is combined and then add a few shakes of fresh black pepper.

Serve straightaway with a little Parmesan cheese on top (keep a pinch or two aside for this when you reach the earlier stage of adding the butter and cheese) and you’ll be ready to tuck into a gorgeous, cheesy, rich midweek meal that from start to finish takes under 10 minutes.