“This pretty sweet treat is so easy to whip up that the hardest part is waiting for the pastry to defrost!” - Nabula El Mourid

“This salad looks stunning on the table. I love the combination of flavours and textures – the crunch of the chickpeas works beautifully with the softly spiced cauliflower. It’s definitely one to try.” - Anna Cameron

“There are a few key things to bear in mind with blended drinks. Try to have everything cold when it goes into the blender; dropping room-temperature ingredients on ice will just cause it to melt and you’ll be left with a runny drink. About 250 g (1 cup) of ice per drink is good. Because the cold numbs your flavour receptors, you can pump up the sweetness more than you usually would in a drink, otherwise they taste thin…”

“As I mentioned in the recipe for the puree used here (see page 97), the Bellini format of puree and sparkling wine is ripe for switching up with seasonal fruit. The Bellini was invented at Harry’s Bar in Venice, which I was lucky enough to visit a few years ago and had a great time. Their peach puree is literally just muddled peaches with very little sugar, so drinks more like peach juice. I prefer the texture from a bit more sugar…”

When you can't be arsed, but you need a quick route to Destination Edible, here’s what you do. Grab some figs, grapes and chunks of feta, drizzle them all with olive oil and a few other bits in a baking dish, then whack the whole thing in the oven. Serve with some toasts and wait for the 'you really shouldn't have gone to so much trouble' accolades to come flowing your way.

“Here’s a dish that basically gives you licence to play with your food! Yusheng is a vibrant, tangy-sweet Chinese New Year salad that’sa confetti explosion of good vibes, prosperity, and everything crunchy. It originated in Southeast Asia and Singapore and Malaysia, who love a tug-of-war over Who Does It Better. It’s kind of their pavlova, if you get us…”

This potato salad with crunchy green beans, nutty toasted buckwheat, soft eggs, and bursts of fresh dill is hearty but fresh, earthy but bright – a salad that’s happy to play wingman to glazed ham, sizzling steaks, roast pork, or even a whole baked snapper. Toasted buckwheat brings the crunch, while a mustard dressing makes every bite addictive…

In a world choking on food trends, we can almost hear you yawn at the mere mention of panforte. But panforte doesn’t care about going viral on The Tok – it’s so above all that noise. It’s as eternal as Siena’s cobbles and is never flashy, never out of date. Dense, chewy, spiced and totally delicious, we make batches for edible gifts at Christmas time because it’s way less hassle than…

“My mom has an intense green thumb, and her pride and joy is her night-blooming jasmine. Summer nights were spent sitting outside basking in the aroma of jasmine while eating freshly cut fruit from my dad. This tiramisu is an edible version of those memories, and it’s made with ladyfingers that are soaked in a delicate jasmine tea and layered with ripe strawberries and a velvety…”

“There’s an excellent Sicilian pasticceria in my neighborhood in Brooklyn called Monteleone, owned by a man who was born and raised in Sicily. His pastries taste as authentic as any you’ll find in Sicily and, lucky for all of us, he makes cuccidati year-round, not just at Christmas time. (That’s when he makes a larger, ring-shaped version called buccellati, or bracelets.)…”

We love good pork, as opposed to bland, boring pork. Which intensively-raised piggy meat can be. It’s worth stumping up for decent quality pork, preferably pasture-raised, as it will have way better flavour and texture – the colour of the flesh should be...

They’re the most refined, delicious oat cookies imaginable; they first appeared in the 1990s and you used to be able to get them here. Duchy Original products were made using organic ingredients grown on Charles’ Duchy of Cornwall land and for an oat biscuit, Duchy Originals were posh. And expensive...

First up it’s the turn of Toulouse, France native Leslie Hottiaux, chef and owner of Auckland’s Apero Restaurant. Packed with hazelnuts and slathered in chocolate, her sensational Florentines are surprisingly simple to make…

Lemon tart… but make it easy, we say! No tricky pastry to roll out and potentially shrink in the oven because you’ve over-handled it… no filling that requires culinary wizardry to get just right. As a bonus, the base here is gluten free, if that’s important to you, although any health-related claims stop well and truly there. No one is pretending…

Did you know that when chefs in NZ discovered filo pastry, sometime in the 1980s, they kind of lost their minds? It was the newest shiny thing in town and they used it in all kinds of ways, many of them completely strange. For example, there was a dish involving…

We love a winter salad! And, as fundamentally lazy types, we like one that’s shaved and raw because it’s nice to have a break from the stove. The key here is in the fine shaving; did you know that the way your food is cut affects the way it eats and tastes? Well that’s our theory anyway, and it’s very true here…

Here’s the kind of yum salmon dinner everyone will love; it’s got lovely sweet-sticky glaze, lashings of Japanese rice, some avo, a salad with rich miso dressing and, the star of the piece, salmon. Little umami touches of toasted nori and the Japanese furikake seasoning add pops of savoury goodness, but…

This concept is fabulous; eggplants cut like hasselback potatoes, the slits filled with a cheesy-savoury stuffing, then baked until the eggplant flesh is tender and the tops, golden. But after various attempts at baking them in a regular oven, using different types and cuts of eggplant…

L.A. spawned the OG chopped salad – the mighty Cobb. Still round today, the Cobb Salad is an artful arrangement of neatly chopped mixed lettuces, tomatoes, bacon, chicken, boiled egg, and blue cheese, set out neatly in rows, and doused in vinaigrette…

There’s something lovely about slow-cooker cooking. It makes meat juicy and really concentrates flavours. It’s pretty much impossible to overcook meat using a slow-cooker and unless you leave the lid off yours and go walkabout for a few days, nothing ever burns in one either…