We know you’re astute so you’ll have noticed a bit of a theme around here lately; namely that at LSC, we’re in complete Christmas denial. We’re unprepared for the tinsel, drunken work parties and Mariah C on a constant loop everywhere we. freaking. go…

Yeah. It’s actually Christmas time. So no need to panic or anything. How is it here already? What happened to 2023? Who pushed the accelerator button on the year? WDK. But one thing we do know is it’s not too late to make these sweet, citrus pickles to go with your…

Dunno ‘bout you but when we’ve got nothing better to do, we love pondering our navels, then asking the universe all manner of weighty questions. Like, what’s a Clootie Dumpling? Why did the Imam faint? How did the duck get cold and the dick cop its spots?…

Want to teach your kid to cook a main course dish they can’t really eff up? Soy Sauce Chicken. Out of inspo and don’t know what to cook? Soy Sauce Chicken. Need a dish that everyone will shut the heck up about and not whine “… but I don't like it”? Soy Sauce Chicken…

Mussels. So simple to cook, so delicious to eat and so darned good for you. An excellent source of lean protein, iron, selenium, iodine and omega-3 fatty acids, we should all be eating them more. There’s so much healthy stuff lurking in those shells…

Holy banging bangers, Batman; can sausages actually get better than their lovely, snag-y self, or what? We reckon they can and here’s Exhibit A… our sausage ragu. Perfect for tossing through pasta, it’s easy to make and is brilliant during these…

When you don’t just want cake, you want damned epic cake, here’s your gig. A marble cake by any other name, this one is all about intense chocolate flavour, shot through with bright pops of orange. And if you stuff up the marbling and end up with more of an…

You don’t have to travel in Turkey very far before encountering this dish; it’s popularly served as a mezze. And – here’s a quick language lesson – ‘mercimek’, Turkish for the red lentils, is pronounced ‘mer-ji-mek.’…

Translating to ‘brothy rice’, this soupy brew is yummo, like all Spanish cooking generally is. Simple, with direct flavours and not a tonne of ingredients, it’s easy to whip up. The Moors brought rice to Spain in the 8th century and today it’s cultivated in Andalucía…

If your Mum, like many Mums, committed culinary crimes against leeks, you might be scarred for life. We’re talking boiled, suffocated in white sauce and… oh, shudder. We just can’t with the leek memories. Happily there are entire cuisines who cook this skinny green veg with…

Are they Greek? Are they Turkish? We’re not going to step into that particularly messy fray, but let’s just say we’ve eaten our fair share of these babies on Turkish soil as part of mezze spreads. Called mücver, we’ve yet to meet anyone who dislikes these fritters…

We don’t much go for those multi-layered, super-rich, cake extravaganzas. They have their place but we prefer more wholesome, humble cakes; the sort that may not look like much, but have that delicious, straightforward, home-baked flavour that knocks you off your perch…

The assignment? To turn a whole heap of English spinach into something everyone would love, and that wasn’t too, you know, spinachy. An overload of spinach tastes ever so slightly metallic. Spinach soup doesn’t ring my bells…

Why are these called The Peanut Brownies We Never Had? Because we still have some bad attitudes toward the 1970’s baking of New Zealand. And yes, before the, er, Peanut Gallery goes, um, nuts, we do know that there were some, uh, gems from that era…

This type of rustic soup, often topped with shreds of the region’s famous radicchio, is popular in the Veneto region of Italy in winter. An example of cucina povera, literally the ‘cooking of the poor’, it speaks to a frugal approach and using what you’ve damned well got on hand…

Love jaffa vibes? Then get on this cake. It’s seriously delicious, with sour cream adding to the overall choc-orange-butter-eggs richness. And, as if 275g of sugar in the batter wasn’t enough, there’s a whole heap more lurking in the syrup plus in the glazed orange situation…

We never met a meatball we didn’t like, We l-o-v-e meatballs. The global meatball repertoire is huge; think polpette (Italy), kofte (Turkey), keftedes (Greece), albondigas (Spain), bakso (Indonesia), bun cha (Vietnam), frikadeller (Germany, Scandinavia and Poland), bitterballen (Netherlands) and the like…

Ovens can be dodgy bastards. See that thermometer dial on yours? If your oven’s calibration slips, which it inevitably will, the dial is not necessarily the most reliable indicator of the exact temperature your oven is at. Bummer. But there’s a simple workaround…

Lamb. Soup. North African flavours. I. Am. So. Here. For. These. A soupy-stew with a lot going for it, we’re in love with the lamby, lentil-y, aromatic, nourishing goodness that is harira. Wiki suggests it can be eaten as a ‘light snack’ but this flour-thickened version…

We can’t lay claim to this fabulous dish; it’s based on a Palestinian recipe from Joudie Kalla’s stunning book, Balaidi Palestine (Quarto UK, 2018). We’ve tweaked and played with it a bit, amping up the garlic and using a stick blender to emulsify the heck out of the dressing…