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....

Miso brings a lovely rich, salty vibe to this apple crumble; it’s subtle though, so if you’re thinking ‘uh-oh, this sounds weird’, don’t fret. It actually works fabulously and we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how good this spin on a Kiwi classic tastes. Use white miso, as it’s the mildest of the whole bunch...

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…

We’re always looking for ways to level up our breakfast routine because it’s easy to get bored with toast and jam, no matter how artisanal and generally amazing they both are. In our quest for a More Exciting Breakfast, we came across a recipe for Morning Glory Muffins, invented in…

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…

Lemon tart… but make it easy, we say! No tricky pastry to roll out and potentially shrink in the oven because you’ve over-handled it… no filling that requires culinary wizardry to get just right. As a bonus, the base here is gluten free, if that’s important to you, although any health-related claims stop well and truly there. No one is pretending…

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…

OK, kids, let’s make choux pastry. It’s a weird beast for sure; you heat water and butter in a smallish saucepan JUST until it simmers and the butter has melted. Next, you dump in sifted flour, then stir like crazy over the heat until the mixture forms a cooked, smooth, floury ball that leaves the side of the pan…

When life gives you rum, you make a cake, no? Well, we do. We don’t touch rum ordinarily as it conjures unfortunate memories of scooping Dark ’n’ Stormies from a plastic bucketful (true story) in our Uni days. Which was not an occasion that crowned anyone with glory, and it’s a miracle we can still face anything flavoured ginger…

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…

We’re self-confessed jam-aholics. Give us a calm morning with plenty of hot coffee and sourdough toast slathered with butter (or ricotta) and scads of decent jam, and we’re happy-as. And note the use of the word ‘decent’ there. Being fussy about jam is not food-snobbery and if you’ve eaten…

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…

If you’re looking at this recipe and wondering why we just didn’t use chicken mince, it’s because we don’t like it. Like, we r-e-a-l-l-y don’t like it. That stuff you get from the supermarket? It’s mushy, pallid and has a really sloppy texture and who knows what sad part of the bird it actually comes from. So yeah, we chop our own…

It’s time to give silverbeet some love. It’s such a healthy veg but the flavour can be quite full-on without something else to mellow it and if you just boil it (eww), it’s really not that interesting. Or nice. Well we don’t think it is and are always keen for new takes on it. As major fans of Middle Eastern cooking…

It’s the weather for making stocks, no? TBH we make stocks year ‘round because they’re easy, and you can portion and freeze them so you’ve always got some on hand. Nothing beats the flavour of a home made stock and because they’re made by simmering…