Overflowing with easy recipes

Chilli crisp pastas, tray bakes & more.

Friends, this edition has it all. Easy weeknight dinners, fun drinks for mornings and afternoons, the perfect cinnamon buns, and somehow two pastas featuring chilli crisp.

There were so many recipes to share, it was a great reminder to only recommend the very best and not a diary of everything I’ve cooked.

Reliable dinners for the busy end of year

A very impressive chicken tray bake

My favourite kinds of weeknight dinners are easy to prep and leave me enough time to do some yoga while they cook. This extremely easy chicken tray bake by Ismat Awan ticked those boxes and more. The chicken is so juicy, possibly because it cooks on top of tinned lentils mixed with cream. I took some leftovers to work the next day and felt like I was eating something from a restaurant (the spice mix is pretty special).

Highly recommend slipping a baking tray beneath the tray bake if it’s your first time making it, just in case there are any drips. There are tips in the recipe for making it vegetarian too, using mushrooms.

Magical pantry red lentil soup

Maybe you know about this soup already (it has 30K five-star reviews!), but I read about it in

Molly Wizenberg

newsletter and it sounded so comforting and simple. By Melissa Clark, this red lentil soup (NYT Cooking gift link) is an excellent pantry dinner. The flavours are surprising for the simplicity of the ingredients. My only tip: when it comes to adding the broth, the pan is quite hot, so I pour the liquid in while wearing an oven mitt because the steam that rises is intense!

I’ve made this soup a bunch of times and enjoyed it with toast, roti, and a cheese and onion scroll.

Scallion pasta with ricotta and chilli crisp

Lately, I’ve become obsessed with cabbages.world, a cute couple who make and post recipes from their Brooklyn apartment. This is their scallion pasta, which used a lot of staples I already had. You blitz together a pesto-like sauce using blanched scallions/spring onions, baby spinach, Parmesan, lemon, sesame seeds and salt. Then it’s served with ricotta and chilli crisp. Watch them make and serve it! For dessert, we had my favourite no-churn olive oil ice cream with hot fudge, an Eric Kim recipe that never fails to cheer me up.

Tony also made an excellent chilli crisp pasta that had very little prep. It’s a creamy fettuccine Alfredo with spinach and chilli crisp (NYT Cooking gift link) by Genevieve Ko and it’s being added to our regular rotation.

Molly Yeh’s vegetarian meatballs

Molly Yeh’s meatless balls are so good. They’re made with roasted walnuts, Parmesan, Italian herbs and panko, which are blitzed together with egg. I made a batch for the freezer one Sunday and was very happy to pull them out on a Thursday night when I was fading.

15 minute tomato and egg with rice

I made this simple and deeply comforting meal one night after work while listening to an episode of This is Love about near-death experiences, as you do. By

Kristina Cho

, it’s a tomato egg for two with plenty of ginger and gravy. I have never made such silky eggs.

I love Kristina’s new cookbook Chinese Enough. The title alone captures something I’ve felt for years. I don’t know how to cook many Chinese dishes and now thanks to books like hers, I am learning in the same way I taught myself to cook. My local bookstore ordered a copy for me, and I promptly ordered a second as a Christmas present for my brother and sister-in-law.

Fun drinks

Salted maple latte

Speaking of Kristina Cho, I listened to her interview on Radio Cherry Bombe and had to try the special latte she mentioned. It’s a salted maple cinnamon latte, and you build it in your cup! It’s maple syrup, sea salt, some cinnamon (which I often forget) before your coffee shot and milk are poured on top. It’s excellent iced or hot.

Iced tea with jasmine, mint and honey

This is my favourite afternoon pick-me-up, inspired by an iced tea I had at Jurassic Magic in LA, which brought me back to life after the 13-hour flight from Sydney with approximately 30 minutes sleep. Turns out I love it when I’m not jet lagged too!

To make it:

1. Cold brew some tea. I put a jasmine and peppermint tea bag in a jar of water (around 2 cups) for about three hours. Pop the jar in the fridge after it brews if you’re not using it straight away.

2. In a smaller jar, make a quick honey syrup by dissolving a tablespoon of honey in roughly double the amount of boiling water and store in the fridge.

3. To serve, fill a glass with ice, add a generous pour of honey syrup, your peppermit and jasmine tea mix, a squeeze of lime and mint leaves. This makes 1 extra-large or two regular iced teas, depending on how much ice you use (I choose lots).

Finally, Violet Bakery’s sugary cinnamon buns

I’ve been baking these cinnamon buns for years and only just realised they contain no yeast, which means you don’t have to factor in proving time. Fun fact: This is the first time I’ve made them properly, I usually mix the butter and cinnamon sugar filling together by accident (instead of brushing the butter on then sprinkling the sugar), and they’ve always worked!

From London’s Violet Bakery, they have a hint of cardamom, which is added to the dough. They’re soft in the middle, crunchy on the outside and are dipped in sugar straight out of the oven for some cinnamon-doughnut vibes. I started baking these one summer to share with friends at brunch with filter coffee and mango cheeks, but they’re good all year round.

P.S I nixed a gift-section so I could squeeze in more recipes. I’ve narrowed it down to just two: a Chips stacking cup for at-home flat whites and coffee beans from my favourite roaster.

I’ll be sending a travel guide for anyone visiting nipaluna/Hobart over the summer. Keep an eye out in the sleepy days between Christmas and New Year. Have a lovely end of the year