This soup is a delicious meal my mum used to make quite often when I was living at home. I don’t make it too often, but when winter arrives its the kind of meal that warms you to the soul. It is super easy to make in one pot, and doesn’t require any fancy ingredients. Soup is never that attractive as a dish, but the smell and the taste really gets me excited. My mum has an Italian backgound, so there may be a basis of Italian or Meditteranean style to this recipe, but certainly with an Aussie twist. This is also a handy meal to cook and freeze the leftovers. If you eat it as an entree, there will be plenty of leftovers for another day.

This dish was inspired by the classic Greek combination of feta cheese and olives. It is a tomato based pasta sauce with the added mediterranean flavour of fennel. Fennel is one of my favourite vegetables, I love to eat it raw, and I cook with it to. Olives added to a pasta dish is a great way to add some flare and colour to a pasta.

This dish I made up with little bit of referencing from my cookbooks, but essentially because I had some fresh ginger root and a lime in the fridge, and the prawn cutlets were on special at my grocery shop! Voila. It tasted so fresh and healthy, with a slightly Japanese style flavour. It was also really easy to prepare and cook, and didn’t take up too much time.

This fabulous risotto I first came across when travelling in Munich Germany, served to us by our German friend. Although I have made it many times since, it is always different to first time. Maybe it was those German cheeses she used. Beetroot seems an unlikely match for a risotto, but the purple colour of the beetroot makes for an outstanding look to the meal. It will be a fabulous hit for your friends or family.

This dish was inspired by a meal I ordered at a local restuarant. There’s no doubt the original chef-made version was very high fat, but I have recreated it as a healthy alternative. It is a pesto flavoured risotto made with pearl barley instead of the traditional arborio rice. Pearl barley is a high fibre grain that needs to be cooked for longer than rice (due to the unrefined nature of it), and is often soaked overnight for quickest cooking. The feta cheese matches really well with the lamb in this dish, and the tomato just adds colour and a fresh cool flavour.