Recipes

Here’s a Vietnamese-influenced chicken noodle soup with pork belly, prawns and truly marvellous Asian herbs that’s easy to make.

Chorizo sausage and chicken livers on pasta Chorizo sausage is a powerful experience, adding heat, potency and red line flavours to this pasta number. For a seasoned diner it’s a blast. And for the beginner cook it’s the chance to easily take your skills to a new level.

Just when you thought you had heard them all, along comes something else you can do with a mealie. Thanks to the Thai-style dipping sauce, these delicious fritters can be a snack or a side dish.

Winter is already knocking on the door. What better way to fight the cold than a delicious, steaming bowl of minestrone? Nothing can equal the flavour and aroma of this classic Italian vegetable soup.

Here’s the good news about two do-it-yourself cooking projects. Pizza needs no introduction. And oven-dried tomatoes are an outstanding addition to pizzas, salads and casseroles.

Forget the time-consuming ‘roast your coffee beans in a pan over gas’ method. Get hi-tech and use a heat gun! The results are a coffee-holic’s dream come true.

Ever since the strandlopers strolled down KZN beaches thousands of years ago, collecting, cooking and eating the shellfish they gathered from the rocks, wild mussels have been an integral part of the earliest South African cuisine. These days you need a licence which limits you to 40 mussels a day. Here’s just one of the wonderful things you can do with them.

This is a great classic with as many variations as there are cooks to make it. This version keeps it simple so allowing even the beginner cook to achieve monumental success.

The love affair with Italian cooking continues with plump and seductive thighs enhanced by herbs, mushrooms and olives. A real classic!

The copyright on this recipe is held by ten million Italian grandmothers. In other words, this is a classic, but for all that, a classic well within the reach of the new cook, determined to handle every single step of his personal carbo-loading...

An early morning visit to the Karkloof Farmers’ Market provided the freshly harvested oyster mushrooms that give this pasta dish its distinctive flavour and texture. For the beginner cook, this meal is a double success as it is delicious hot or cold

On a hot, humid Durban Saturday, the last thing any normal person would want to do is spend a couple of sweaty hours in the kitchen, but when the purple grapefruit season arrives, that’s what you have to do.

Pickling is a great kitchen experience, producing crunchy, exquisitely sour snacks. I suspect that there’s nothing organic that can’t be pickled. For many diners, crunchy pickled cucumbers are a constant favourite. That said, here’s the basic kit to get you going ...

This chicken dish will blast the culinary socks off your diners. For this dish, I have varied the seasoning and the method to produce stir-fry chicken with galangal (a type of ginger) and Sichuan peppers.

To many, a curry is a good old Anglo-Saxon stew destroyed by some stale yellow powder out of a cardboard box. This opinion could not be more misinformed: Indian-influenced cuisine is an irresistible combination of subtle tastes and aromas. What we have here are two delicious recipes, with the pilau giving a loud, hearty wake up call to the rice.

Cajun chicken

Eggs Onassis: A breakfast for your inner millionaire.

Most cooks desperately keen for novel experiences take a shot at making jam. This they do once and never again, their kitchens awash with fruit pulp, the hobs sticky with boiled-over proto-jam, their carefully sterilised jars filled with runny slop that never sets and grows mildew you could harvest with a panga. Alternatively, you can do the previously unimaginable and make the stuff in the microwave. It’s beyond belief, I grant you, but it works!

A classic - with a delicious mushroomy twist.

Out of all the extraordinary and enticing Indian-accented foods available, breyani is one of the all-time greats. Breyani, no matter how you spell it, is not a single dish but an entire menu all on its own. For beginner cooks struggling to break away from braais, this recipe is the way to go.