Dammit, we’re not waiting any longer! We’re dusting off the barbie, firing it up, and cooking pork neck if it rains, sleets, snows, or kills us. And what better meat than pork for kicking off the barbecue season in tasty style? And what better cut than neck? It’s juicy, thanks to all the lovely marbling of fat, which slowly renders...

Why, hello Javanese-inspired recipe! What are you doing hanging around here? Indonesian cuisine is nowhere near as vaunted as Thai or Vietnamese, so what makes you think we’d be at all interested in your fried tofu yumminess and your saucey, peanutty goodness...

Vietnam, bless it, has some unique ingredients and techniques that we go nuts for. Having been lucky enough to visit the country numerous times over the last 20 years, we can say, hand on heart, it has one of our all time favourite cuisines on the planet. The food is next level; it’s fresh, zingy and so incredibly varied, we never get sick of eating it...

A real meal-in-a-bowl, you can easy scale this recipe up, increasing everything by a half or even doubling it. As the soup freezes well, you can then have plenty to pull out for an easy meal when time runs short to cook dinner. We like roasting our beets separately, adding them to the soup near the end of cooking...

These flatbreads are fun to put together and they’re versatile too. You could serve them as a side for a soup, or with a Middle-Eastern themed roast lamb dinner, or even as leftovers for breakfast, reheated in the oven until the bread-y part turns crisp. We like serving them as part of a mezze (also spelled ‘meze’) spread…

We made beef stock. From scratch. It was so good that we don’t know why we don’t whip it up more often. Maybe it’s the 8 hour simmering time that puts us off? (Not really, as this can be done in the background; it’s not like you have to hover and watch it the whole time.)...

We’re still banging on about Father’s Day with these. We were thinking about the ultimate dinner feast to whip up for a deserving dad, and as cliche as it sounds we kept coming back to steak. But a really great steak, crusty and seared, dripping in basting butter and served simply with sea salt and fresh grinds of the pepper mill...

Is it too late to sneak in a soup recipe before spring? We think not. And not just any old soup either; a smooth, silky pumpkin one that skews Thai. With plenty of natural sweetness, pumpkin is an excellent foil for the sweet-sour-spicy-salty flavour formula that gives Thai food so much tasty depth...

There’s a new way to cook lamb shanks in town; trussed up in paper. The idea is, the baking paper packaging traps all the juices and steam inside, keeping the shanks super-succulent and tasty as they cook. We don’t think you could possibly over-cook these as there is no way they can possibly dry out...

Take a Scottish classic, sprinkle over a popular American seasoning, then serve with eggs and smoked salmon and let the deliciousness flow! Tattie (for ‘potato’) scones are more like flatbread or griddle bread than an actual scone and they don’t rise too much. But they’re wonderfully potato-y and easy, and are the perfect foil for everything else going on here....

This isn’t our first slow-baked salmon rodeo, as you’ll know if you saw our recipe for Roasted Salmon with Dried Tomato and Walnuts a month or so back. Delicious. Because we loved the results so much, we’ve riffed off the same theme again, this time using harissa and some orange as complimentary flavours…

We’ve yet to meet a dhal we disliked and, as the Subcontinent is filled with variations on the theme of spicy, soupy lentils, we’re far from done with this pulse-based dish. Dahl is dependably easy, filling and delicious, and a dish you can generally whip up using affordable pantry staples. It’s quick too…

Welcome to Fellah Köfte. With roots in Turkish and MIddle Eastern cuisine, it’s a humble kind of a dish using everyday staples that would traditionally have been super-cheap and constantly on hand. Depending on what burghul and semolina cost in your vicino, it’s still pretty cheap to make and if you can get Turkish pepper paste all the better…

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that this kind of a bung-together-and-forget simmered recipe would be made for the slow cooker, wouldn’t you. So did we. But THREE tests and many chicken legs later (many bloody legs), we can hand-on-heart report that it is, in fact, way better and far less hassle to just simmer it on the stove…

We never jumped on the kale-as-superfood bandwagon but TBH we don’t jump on too many bandwagons, food or otherwise. We’re just not bandwagon jumpers. (Kale chips? Remember them? Pffft). Kale was always just another cruciferous vegetable to us, and one that got annoyingly stuck in our teeth whenever we ate it…

These are so satisfying to make. You simmer onions whole until they turn tender, carefully scoop out the innards, chop them up, mix them into a cheesy, bread-based stuffing, then pile this into the outer onion shells and bake until they’re deep golden and crusty on top. Yum. This is the kind of dish that comes from the Italian cucina povera tradition…

Hands up who has memories of their Mum making shepherd’s pie? Us too. Ours minced the cold roast lamb using a hefty metal mincer with a crank handle. It screwed onto the edge of the bench or dining table and made short work of reducing the lamb to teeny tiny bits; yes, kids, there was life before food processors…

Why use the Italian name for this dish? Because when translated, ribollita means ‘reboiled’ and we don’t know about you but a dish with that name would not exactly entice us to the dinner table. “What’s for dinner, Mum?” “Reboiled!!” “Ooh…

Did you know that when chefs in NZ discovered filo pastry, sometime in the 1980s, they kind of lost their minds? It was the newest shiny thing in town and they used it in all kinds of ways, many of them completely strange. For example, there was a dish involving…

Some ingredients just have a natural affinity which shouldn’t be monkeyed with. Lentils. Bacon. Vinegar. Spinach. No amount of yuzu/tahini/maple syrup/pickle juice/smoked paprika/bee pollen/hot honey/Reece’s cups or whatever other flavours are currently smashing it on Reels, can possible be an improvement. Full stop, end of story, no arguing…