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 recipe is a fabulous light summery meal, with a slightly higher degree of difficulty in making, but well worth it! The idea came from the Masterchef series, where the stuffed squid was a pressure test. I have changed it to make it a bit easier to prepare at home, lower in fat, and higher in carbohydrates. Buying already prepared squid tubes is much easier than having to prepare a whole squid – my kitchen is not big enough for that! The salad is so simple and tasty, but I thought after making it that you could combine the rice into the salad to make a great rice salad. The squid stuffing has a great lemony bite.

Risotto is a great one-pot dish and is very quick to make. It is the type of meal that you can substitute whatever ingredients you have in your fridge or pantry. This great tasting risotto is a perfect match with grilled fish. The recipe has been modified from Sally James’ Victor Chang Cardiac Research Cookbook, with the original recipe using beef, which I replaced with fish, as I thought it better suited the lemony risotto.