When time’s short, we pimp like crazy. And nothing begs pimping more than a tub of hummus… and look, you could make your own for this recipe if you liked. But we’re cheating like hell here because we’re all out of time this week and we’re rooting for Team Easy. You just grab a half kilo of lamb (or beef) mince, give it a hard sear, amp it up with spices, a slosh of pomegranate molasses and…

Spring greens! Creamy buttermilk dressing! Poached chicken! All the Spring Things! If we lost you at ‘poached chicken’, hear us out. We’ve legit found a way to poach chicken breast fillets so they don’t turn into tasteless cardboard and it’s super, super easy. Happily for the busy cook, it even involves an amount of neglect. Here’s the scoop…

Let’s talk skordalia – part sauce, part dip, and all kinds of delicious. The name comes from the Greek word skordo (σκόρδο), meaning garlic, which tells you everything you need to know… if you don’t like garlic, trust us when we tell you this isn’t for you so just jog on. Creamy, rich and punchy…

Succulent butterflied chicken… but make it flat! That’s what happens when you cook chicken under weights and no, you don't literally have to use bricks, although you could. We busted out cans of food from our pantry, totalling 3-4 kg in all. Cooking chicken under weights is a technique that gives you gorgeously juicy, crispy-skinned bird…

This recipe is our laid-back riff on fattoush, a zingy, crunchy Middle Eastern salad that’s packed with juicy veggies, crispy pita, and a tangy dressing. Fattoush usually features tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, and capsicum, with the dressing kicked up with lemony sumac. We’re taking culinary liberties with…

Fabulous fresh flavours in a flash – and yes, we’re getting all alliterative with this yum, Thai-inspired dish. When you want your noodles quick and you want your noodles with a kick (yep, we’re rhyme-y today too), this recipe will sort you. All you do is make a simple aromatic paste for stir-frying the mince, whip up an easy sweet-sour-salty dressing…

Yes, a curry paste from scratch, but hear us out. This curry is delicious, but not if you shortcut things. It’s our take on a Nonya curry; the Nonyas (also called the Peranakans) are communities descended from Chinese immigrants who settled in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, intermarried with locals, and blended their heritage with Malay influences. Their food is a true fusion cuisine…

While nothing says ‘I care’ or ‘look at me go’ like homemade dumplings, sometimes frozen ones are a total lifesaver when we’re running out of time. And when we make a dinner out of frozen dumplings, normally we just boil them, steam a pile of Asian greens…

Right. It’s roll-your-sleeves-up time. This dish has a few (very easy) components, so set yourself some time to create an Indian-inspired feast that will fully knock socks off. Fans of rice, spice, lamb and spuds will be in heaven...

We love good pork, as opposed to bland, boring pork. Which intensively-raised piggy meat can be. It’s worth stumping up for decent quality pork, preferably pasture-raised, as it will have way better flavour and texture – the colour of the flesh should be...

Need a holiday on a plate? Here you go! This salad is nothing short of an utterly delicious serve of sunshine that will go great with your next barbecue or chillaxed, Med-themed dinner party. And look, maybe it’s too early for tomatoes? We couldn’t wait for when they are at their sun-ripened best, but if you’re more restrained than we are...

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...

We’re on a bit of a mezze kick this week, if you hadn’t noted. Full disclosure; we were hopeful of nicer weather to be able to take a light dinner outside but we should have known better. We’ve only lived here for most of our lives. Sigh. But when things do perk up in the warmth and sunshine department...

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 have an entire repertoire of veggie and pulse-based dips...

Guilty as charged, Your Honour: there are a lot of ‘or to tastes’ going on here. While you might see these as a recipe-writing cop out, we see them as giving you the freedom to lavish lemon, parmesan, nutmeg, basil and whatnot on your pasta as you jolly well see fit. You might like things tarter, puckery-er, cheesier...

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...

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. (Our orange was a blood one but use whatever you have. We like the slightly spiky flavour of…