Category: Winter

Slow-cooked Beef Cheeks with Balsamic

Meltingly tender, richly flavoured, perfect for chilly days.

Kiwifruit Salsa

A handy little salsa to add a juicy sweet hot bite to your meals – try it spooned into the hollows of halved avocados.

French Roasted Chicken with Verjuice

Get your groove on with this chicken mamma – it’s so amazing!

Grilled Broccolini with Feta

Skinny green stems never tasted so good.

Baked Potatoes in White Wine – time to revisit

White wine keeps the interior of these potatoes nice and fluffy, but the outsides develop a good golden crunch. Pretty good, yep.

Peas in a soup? Yeah! Thick, warming, intriguing … oh, and speedy, and requiring little more than a bag of frozen peas and a few spices. This was so popular last week, I’ve kept it up for another blast!

Baked Vegetables with Sizzled Haloumi

Way to go – jazz up a tray bake with sizzled haloumi and a tangy dressing

Pears

Pears are often overlooked for novel or exotic fruit and I reckon it’s because we’ve lost the art of ripening them and we’re eating them hard.

Potato & Celeriac Mash with Crispy Bacon

Pillowy mash with little salty nuggets of bacon – go on, make it, you know you want some!

Ilaria’s Burnt Orange Soup

This soup is insanely easy – you probably can’t get much simpler than this.

Chicken with Spanish Flavours

Whoop-de-whoop! Chicken, chorizo, smoked paprika, char-grilled red pepper, orange & olives … all you need is a fork!

Cavolo Nero – with chilli!

Green leafy things get a kick along

Love your spuds

… so much you can do with them. Woo-hoo!

Baked Potatoes Stuffed with Smoked Fish & Paprika

Time to get off the couch and get cooking!

Fresh Leaf Salad with Asian Flavours

Oh yay! A big bowl of salad greens that tastes so good, you can eat it on its own.

Rhubarb, Apple & Ginger Crumble

Yep, someone ate it all up!

Rhubarb

Rhubarb forms a pretty pink syrup when cooked with redcurrant jelly and orange. It also likes peaches, plums, raspberries & strawberries, but it’s winter here, so apple & ginger it is.

Roasted Broccoli with Mozzarella & Sultanas

Melting mozzarella atop roasted broccoli, with sultanas, chillies, anchovies and pine nuts can only have one place of origin: Sicily!

Cooking classes in June & July

Cooking classes on Waiheke – enjoy a winter’s day in a warm kitchen and go home inspired to cook up a feast!

Best-ever Roasted Parsnips with Crispy Parmesan & Garlic

These were such a huge hit last week, that I’m running them again in case you missed them.

Cheese Straws

Good with wine, good with beer, easy to eat, and delicious. What more do you want from a cheese straw?

Leek & Bacon Tartlets

Mmmmm creamy leeks with bacon and mustard all stuffed into little rounds of cheesy pastry …

Leeks – all you need to know and then some …

Most of us have heard of cock-a-leekie (a Scottish soupy stew made with chicken and leeks) but hat-a-leekie is something else. Why anyone would want to wear a leek in their hat is beyond me, but not to the Welsh who claim the leek as their national symbol – all to do with a bunch of …