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 pasta meal is one I actually made up myself. Coriander is one of my favourite herbs (along with basil). I use it a lot when cooking Asian stir-fry dishes, but it seems to go really well with salmon. The dish is so quick to prepare it will only take 1/2 an hour, and it doesn’t require any tricky preparation techniques. It is a high carbohydrate meal as it is based on pasta, and is moderate fat due to the cream it contains (a tip below to reduce this). The recipe asks for tinned salmon, but if you’re not on a budget you could also use fresh salmon.

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.