30-minute meals for busy weeknights
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.
The viral 2-ingredient watermelon ice cream hack, tested so you don't have to: half a watermelon frozen completely solid with a little hollow scooped out of the middle — like a Parmesan wheel — then filled with milk and scraped at with a spoon so the icy shavings swirl into the milk and turn into creamy pink ice cream, right inside the melon. No ice cream maker, no blender, no added sugar. We went in skeptical and came out converts: it's light, fresh, and the watermelon itself is the bowl.
These crispy rice paper seaweed chips are the fastest snack we've ever made: a sheet of rice paper pressed onto salted, sesame-sprinkled nori, cut into quarters, and microwaved for about two minutes until it puffs into a shatteringly crisp chip. No oil, no frying, no baking — just a microwave. It's a shortcut take on Korean gim bugak (fried seaweed crackers), and the rice paper blisters up exactly like the traditional rice-batter coating. Salty, nutty, ridiculously moreish, and naturally vegan and gluten-free.
Juicy prawns pan-seared in rich garlic butter with a squeeze of fresh lemon. This is my go-to when I want something that feels fancy but takes almost no effort. Serve with crusty bread to mop up every last drop of that golden butter sauce.
Salmon fillets coated in a rich miso-mirin glaze and broiled until caramelised and flaky. This is my weeknight fish recipe when I want something that feels restaurant-quality but requires almost no effort.