Spaghetti with mixed seafood.

It's commonly called pasta marinara, but marinara in Italy is a tomato sauce. The more correct name is pescatora, but I'm not getting into any arguments so let's just use English and call it spaghetti with mixed seafood. It still tastes the same. As long as you cook it well, which means not too long.

You can buy 'marinara' mix at the supermarket but it is usually yesterday's seafood chopped, frozen and then thawed for sale. I usually buy fresh components: a fillet of salmon and some fresh prawns, calamari, scallops and mussels. 

Cook spaghetti to al dente. While it's cooking, heat some oil in a pan, saute some onion and then garlic - don't hold back on the garlic; garlic and seafood is a match made in Atlantis - and take great care not to burn anything. Add wine and slosh it around. 

Now add the seafood, some tomato passata and a handful of chopped parsley leaves and stalks. While being generous with everything else in this dish, add only enough passata to tinge the seafood sauce to an orangey-pink, like the setting sun over the Indian Ocean on a warm Perth summer night. 

Stop cooking when the largest piece of seafood in the mix is just cooked through. You want each morsel to be succulent and not dried out. As with all cooking you are playing with thermodynamics in this dish, but seafood is not forgiving of overcooking. (I should know: my mother invented blackened fish decades before Paul Prudhomme offered the Cajun version to paying customers in the USA.)

I used to use chili in this dish but held back when the children were younger. Chili is now creeping back in. Tastes are maturing. 

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The Mornington Peninsula ocean beaches are dangerous troughs of surging, sweeping, sucking brine pushed in from Bass Strait and siphoned back out again. A day of surfing makes teenagers ravenous.

I placed the al dente spaghetti - we're up to two 500g packs now - on a sharing platter the size of a tractor wheel and poured the succulent, garlicky seafood over the top, scattering a mixture of grated lemon peel, finely diced garlic and chopped parsley as a garnish. (Cheese is traditionally not served with seafood pasta but the hell with tradition. Some of them wanted it. The very salty pre-grated parmesan you buy in the pasta section of the supermarket works fine.)