Other choices include mini crab cakes, sandwiches on sourdough bread, couscous salad, wontons with ginger sauce, sausage, broccoli rape and sun-dried tomato pasta, and chocolate-covered strawberries.
Tesco's version is effortlessly juicy, with its cherry acidity and strawberry fruit working well with tomato pasta and festive cold cuts.
There are no secrets: As you watch, flat sheets of white, spinach, whole wheat or tomato pasta can be cut to any width requested and wrapped in butcher paper for $2.99 a pound.
Although there are numerous sandy beaches (or, alternatively, a day on Giuseppe's boat, which is very Dolce Vita with extra lashings of fresh tomato pasta and fine white wine), we go to the Turkish Steps.
To top your pizza, you could make a simple tomato sauce, but if you're short on time, jarred pestos and those small, intensely flavoured aubergine and tomato pasta sauces work a treat.
By midday the farm cottage table is overflowing with mushroom pancakes, barley salad and baked fennel and a cauldron of steaming tomato pasta – all cooked in organic olive oil from last year's harvest.
So I had three or four basic meals: fish fingers and a tomato; a packet scotch egg and a tomato; pasta with a tin of tomatoes; and extra mild plastic-y cheddar chopped into cubes with bits of cucumber.
Hugh cooked them up an egg curry and some mushroom bhajis before leaving them with a selection of suitably hearty recipes (roast vegetables with cheese sauce and mashed potato, roast tomato pasta, root vegetable crumble) to get them through the week.
