Recipes

Beans have the wonderful ability to absorb lots of flavour while they slowly bake. They’re nutritious, tasty and easy.

A baked stuffed potato is a thing of beauty. It’s the perfect blend of all your favourite potato topping flavours mixed together in an easy-to-make, easy-to-serve, all-in-one package.

The secret to perfectly oven-roasted potatoes is a two-step process. First, gently boil and cook potatoes through, then rapidly roast and brown them. The resulting crisp exterior and tender interior are quite addictive.

If you like golden brown crispy crusty potatoes, then this dish is for you. It was originally created as a way to use up leftover boiled or baked potatoes, but it’s so good that you’ll soon be cooking potatoes just so you can smash and crisp ’em.

Risotto is one of the world’s great rice dishes. It’s a traditional Italian dish that must be made from rice varieties with very high starch contents. Its distinctive cooking method gently coaxes the starches out of each rice grain, giving the dish its characteristic creaminess. An exercise in patience, but the results are more than worth the effort!

This simple, versatile rice pilaf is distinguished by its method of sautéing the grains briefly in oil or butter before adding liquid which adds flavour and helps the grains stay fluffy and separate. Rice pilaf is also a great jumping-off point for freestyle flavouring.

This is one of my all-time favourite comfort foods. Just like high-starch rice, barley may be simmered and stirred into a smooth, creamy risotto, absorbing the flavour of the bacon and rich chicken broth as it slowly cooks. The results are richly flavoured and deeply satisfying.

This rustic dish shows how easy it is to braise any type of meat in a tomato sauce. The results are tender, flavourful and perfect for any type of pasta. This is a hearty meal in a bowl.

This is my family’s all-time favourite dinner party pasta dish. Our friends request it all the time. I’m happy to oblige because it tastes great, and the sauce makes itself! It’s easy. Steaming wet, just-cooked pasta and melting cream cheese form an incredibly smooth luxurious sauce. The smoked salmon adds flavour extravagance that’s balanced by the familiar flavours of capers, dill, lemon, onion and mustard. A five-star dish for sharing!

You haven’t lived until you’ve roasted tomatoes with onions and garlic and tossed them with pasta! Roasting reveals a deep, satisfying flavour hidden in tomatoes. This will become one of your favourite ways to dress up pasta. My family loves the simple rustic flavours of this dish, and I’m sure yours will too.

The best lasagna is made with two different sauces: a tomato sauce and a cheese sauce. It’s the sort of dish that’s worth taking the time to make it right, but that doesn’t mean you have to slave away in the kitchen for hours. There are lots of ways to speed up the process and still enjoy spectacular results!

There’s nothing more satisfying than a bowl full of spaghetti and meatballs and my gold standard tomato sauce. Every cook has an all-purpose tomato sauce up his or her sleeve, a perfect last-minute pasta sauce that’s just as good served without meatballs.