30-minute meals for busy weeknights
Homemade stracciatella is the creamy, stringy centre of burrata — and it turns out you can make it at home with just three ingredients. Fresh mozzarella from the brine gets pulled into tiny shreds, folded through thickened cream with a pinch of flaky salt, then left to set in the fridge overnight. Spoon it over tomatoes, pile it on sandwiches, or dollop it onto pasta and pizza. It's a fraction of the price of buying it at a restaurant or deli.
This 15 minute tuna pasta turns a humble can of tuna into something spectacular. Sun-dried tomatoes and kalamata olives get sautéed in their own flavourful oil with onion and garlic, then simmered with flaked tuna and passata into a rich, punchy sauce. It's full of flavour, needs no standing around at the stove, and feeds 5–6 people from mostly pantry staples — exactly what you want on a busy weeknight.
Twenty-four mini sausage rolls from $9.20 of ingredients — pork and beef mince bulked out with grated carrot and onion, wrapped in puff pastry, brushed with egg wash and baked until deeply golden. Grating the veg in keeps the filling juicy rather than dense, and the whole tray disappears in about ten minutes flat. Perfect for parties, lunchboxes, or a very good dinner with tomato sauce.
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.