Risotto without standing over the stove ladling stock for half an hour: everything goes into a baking dish, gets covered with foil, and the oven does the work. Loaded with bacon, sweet roasted pumpkin, and a big handful of spinach folded through at the end, this feeds a family of six for $9.81 all up. It's creamy, filling, and genuinely one of the best-value meals in my rotation.
Mille feuille nabe is the Japanese hotpot that looks like it took hours and takes about fifteen minutes to put together. Whole cabbage leaves and thin beef slices get stacked into layers, sliced into strips, then packed upright in the pot so the cut edges fan out like a flower. A sweet-savoury sukiyaki broth of dashi, soy, mirin, and sake goes over the top, and everything gently simmers until the beef is just cooked and the cabbage is silky. Genuinely impressive, genuinely healthy, genuinely easy.
Congee made properly: leftover rotisserie chicken carcasses simmered with spring onion and a whole bulb of garlic into a deeply savoury broth, then cooked down slowly with jasmine rice until it collapses into a silky, comforting porridge. It costs almost nothing because the broth comes from bones you'd otherwise bin, and it's the thing I want most when the weather turns. Finish with spring onions, sesame seeds, and a drizzle of sesame oil.
Two ingredients. That's it. A box of brownie mix and a block of silken tofu blitzed smooth, and you get brownies that come out genuinely chewy and fudgy — no butter, no eggs, no oil, no milk. The tofu does all the binding and moisture work the eggs and butter normally would, and you can't taste it at all. They're even better the next day straight from the fridge.
Leeks roasted low and slow until they go sweet and jammy, then drowned in a garlicky cream sauce and baked again until bubbling and golden. It's a side dish in name only — every time I make this it's the thing everyone goes back for seconds of. Barely any hands-on work either: the oven does almost all of it while you get on with the rest of dinner.
This creamy Korean kimchi pasta is my favourite fusion weeknight pasta — deeply savoury tomato-and-cream sauce built around finely chopped kimchi and deglazed with a splash of soju. The fermented tang cuts through the richness like a squeeze of lemon, so the result is punchy and umami but never spicy. Ready in about 20 minutes, and it tastes like it took much longer.
I'm the home cook behind Kat Cooks Daily (and the founder of Food Inbox).
I believe cooking is for everyone, and great food doesn't need complicated!
Every recipe I post is tried and tested by me here in Sydney, Australia. I hope you try some of them!
More about meA no-bake summer dessert that layers syrup-soaked Italian finger biscuits with fluffy mango cream and thin slices of fresh ripe mango. It's the easiest tiramisu I've ever made — just four ingredients, no eggs, no coffee — and it gets even better after a night in the fridge. Make it the day before and you've got an impressive entertaining dessert that practically assembles itself.
A tropical no-bake twist on the Italian classic
No spam, no fluff — just the recipes Kat is cooking, plus tips from a real home kitchen.