This week's recipe comes from Sicily, showcasing fresh swordfish steaks. By the end of the 1990s swordfish had become an endangered species, but strict quotas have replenished stocks in the wild. Although this delicious fish is still endangered in the Mediterranean, it is now sustainable and safe to eat in Eastern Australia and the North Atlantic. The best dried oregano comes from Greece and Italy in the form of dried branches which which just require a bit of shaking to release the fragrant herb.

My travels recently took me to the Margaret River region, a little slice of paradise known to locals as "Margs" in the South West corner of Western Australia. 3 hours easy drive from WA's capital city Perth (5 hours by plane from Sydney). This region is famous for a relaxed and often alternative lifestyle, a temperate climate and excellent cool climate wines from vineyards nestled among classic Australian bushland.

This week's recipe comes from Southern Italy, combining fresh tender artichokes with potatoes and optional slices of smoked ham.  In Italy it would be made with waxy potatoes sliced into thick wedges, but Kipfler potatoes work particularly well with this recipe.  Artichokes oxidise and turn an unpleasant black colour almost immediately they are cut, so it is essential to put them in a mixture of water and lemon juice prevent this.

This week's recipe comes from the Eastern Mediterranean, and is particularly popular in Turkey and Greece (where it is called Dolmades).  Dolmas are grape vine leaves stuffed with rice, herbs and sometimes ground lamb, but I prefer this vegetarian version.  They are usually made with dill as the principal herb, but parsley works just as well, especially for those who find the slightly aniseed flavour of dill a little over powering. 

This recipe dates from Northern Italy in the eighties and is a variation of a similar dish made with smoked salmon.   The twist is the addition of grated lemon zest and juice to give a zingy freshness to the dish.  Swapping the lemon for lime is a great alternative for a slightly more perfumed version.  It is important to add the lemon juice only at the very last minute otherwise it will start cooking the fish.

This week's recipe comes from the North African side of the Mediterranean, and is very popular in Morocco.  The original recipe is a method of slow cooking tough but flavoursome cuts of old cattle, combined with  juicy local dates and  typical north African spices over several hours. I use rump steak which is full of flavour but does not require a long cooking time to tenderise.

This week's recipe comes from Sicily, with the inclusion of pine nuts, raisins and saffron a direct reminder of Sicily's distant past when it was under Arab Moorish rule between 827 and 1091 CE. For many people cauliflower is a bland vegetable that is all too often cooked to death.  If it is roasted or added to a pasta sauce, its delicate flavour is quite delicious. 

This week's recipe comes from the eastern part of the Mediterranean, in Lebanon where  Samke Harra means spicy fish in Arabic.  This  dish  showcases fresh Mediterranean fish, tahini (sesame paste), garlic, lemon juice, coriander and pine nuts. Tahini is a staple in Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine.  It is a thick, smooth paste made from ground sesame seeds., with  a rich, nutty flavour and creamy texture similar to peanut butter. 

This week's recipe comes from Normandy, where plenty of sustainable cod is fished.  Cod is not found  in the southern hemisphere, so a good substitute is any firm white fish such as Ling or Blue Eye Trevallya   It is a simple and elegant dish, requiring short preparation and even shorter cooking time.  The lemon emulsifies with the juices from the fish and the butter to form a delicious sauce not dissimilar to beurre blanc. 

This week's recipe is another perfect dish for fish on Friday. It is also one of the easiest and quickest dishes to make, especially if you are  using good quality fresh egg pasta, which is now easily available in most supermarkets.  Making your own pasta is not difficult, and if you feel up to the challenge, the recipe is here…

This week's recipe is perfect for fish on Friday, and is popular in both Italy and France - where it is usually cooked without the pancetta.  Sweet scallops have a great affinity with the smoky saltiness of thinly sliced pancetta (cured belly pork), particularly when  they are caramelised.  As always with scallops, it is important to sear them quickly so they are medium rare in the centre and retain their sweet juices.

This week's recipe comes from my travels to Istanbul earlier this year. In Turkish, Barbunya means Borlotti beans, and Pilaki means dishes cooked with olive oil, onion, garlic, potatoes, carrots and tomatoes. Borlotti beans (which are a very rich source of protein) are seasonal from late summer to mid autumn and very distinctive for their  cream pods with maroon splashes.  The beans themselves have the same colouring, but this disappears during cooking. 

This week's recipe originates in the northern Italian regions of Piemonte and Emila-Romagna, where butter is more prevalent than olive oil in the cooking.  It is very similar to the burnt butter and sage sauce used to dress home made gnocchi, and the additional of optional grated lemon zest adds additional flavour and freshness.   It was originally a cucina povera…

Interlude is the Michelin starred restaurant at Leonardslee House, a country house and estate just outside Horsham in West Sussex. The estate has a history going back several centuries, before being acquired by South African based entrepreneur Penny Streeter OBE in July 2017 and painstakingly restored prior to being opened to the public in 2019.  Today it hosts magnificent gardens and vines for the production of English sparkling wine as well as an award winning restaurant that gained its first Michelin star in 2025. 

My travels recently took me to Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland.   It is a magnificent city which is the inspiration behind so much in the Harry Potter books and well worth a visit. A famous (and unfairly maligned) Scottish dish is Haggis, a classic example of "nose to tail" cuisine made of oats, sheep's blood, and various sheep's offal including heart, lungs and liver, seasoned liberally with salt and pepper.

This week's recipe is very popular in central Italy. Eating offal was once common and although it has become a polarising topic, calves' liver is mild flavoured and absolutely delicious. It is essential to serve it rare because when overcooked, it becomes dense and unappetising. Liver is often served in French bistros with richly flavoured jus, but in Italy it is kept simple, either with the Venetian speciality of fried onions, or as in this central Italian recipe, with crisp fried sage In central Italy, serving grilled or pan fried meat with a wedge of lemon to squeeze the juice over the meat is common, and a good way to counter the richness of a cut such as calves' liver.

Nose to tail eating has become quite fashionable in recent years, but in countries like France and Italy people have always eaten every part of an animal, finding ways to bring flavour out of unpromising cuts such as offal, and wasting nothing. A good example is this week's recipe, which is a mainstay of good quality restaurants throughout France. Sweetbreads are the thymus gland or pancreas from a young calf, with a tender succulent texture and a delicious slightly gamey flavour.

This week's recipe comes from central Italy.   It combines delicious rabbit with the herbs that grow so abundantly in Umbria, Tuscany and Le Marche, fennel and rosemary which together with garlic also provide the flavour profile of porchetta.  Good quality rabbit is very popular in both France and Italy, and is readily available in all butcher's shops. It is not a difficult meat to joint (see the picture below) but it's easiest to ask the butcher to this for you.

This week's recipe is another French classic, essentially a Shepherd's Pie made with confit of duck.  In France it is normally made with just duck, but the addition of classic soffritto vegetable ingredients carrot, celery and onion elevates the dish and improves the flavour.   The dish is named after Antoine Parmentier, an 18th century apothecary who did much to promote the growing of potatoes as a means of combatting the regular cycles of famine then prevalent in France.

This week's recipe is popular across Andalusia and the Algarve in neighbouring Portugal, both of which claim it as their own. Rice is grown in both regions, a legacy of the former Moorish rulers of southern Iberia, who introduced rice cultivation in the 11th century. It is sometimes made with long grain rice, but short grain is much better, preferably from Spain or Portugal.

This is a classic French bistro recipe, enlivened by the addition of new season green asparagus spears.  It is one of the quickest and most simple dishes to prepare, but has a luxury feel to it.   If garden peas are in season they are wonderful, but by all means use frozen peas for an equally delicious result.   In a restaurant the hot peas would be puréed in a Tamis sieve to ensure silky smoothness, but in the home kitchen a blender will do just fine, resulting in a slightly more textured but equally delicious purée. 

This week's unlikely sounding recipe is not sweet and is sublimely delicious.  I'm not normally a fan of mixing fruit with savoury dishes, but was tempted to try this recipe after eating an extraordinary strawberry and raw prawn starter recently at Michelin starred Onice in Nice (see picture below).    Strawberry risotto is claimed variously to have been  invented in the seventies and eighties by more than one chef  in an attempt to introduce innovative  new dishes to the Italian culinary repertoire.

This week's recipe represents a more  innovative type of  Italian pasta cooking, using black garlic.  Black garlic, invented in Japan in 1999, is normal garlic that has been cooked at a constant 65 degrees celsius with high humidity for 30 days.  The Maillard reaction it undergoes with this slow and gentle cooking turns it into a sort of garlic confit, highlighting its natural sugars and resulting in a delicious and mellow flavour similar to aged balsamic vinegar. 

This is another recipe from Spain, marrying new season broad beans, spicy chorizo sausage, tomato and optional cumin to add a slightly Asian flavour.   Broad beans are a legume Some recipes call for shelling the broad beans, but this is not necessary if they are early in the season and relatively small.  I like to serve this as part of a Tapas style relaxed lunch or dinner, together with dishes such as…

This week’s recipe is another  "salé-sucré" (sweet and salty)  variation of the famous caramelised apple based Tarte Tatin.  It works best with large Ox Heart tomatoes because these are mostly flesh with very little seeds or liquid.   Normally the main ingredient of a Tarte Tatin, whether it be apples or a vegetable such as chicory, is caramelised on the stove top before the pastry is added and finished in  the oven. 

This week's recipe is a type of Tajine  from the North African side of the Mediterranean, and is very popular in Algeria.   In Algerian Arabic, "Batata"(بطاطا) means potato and "Koucha" (كوشة) means oven.   As is so often the case there are many variations of this dish, and this particular version is also a very delicious way to cook potatoes on their own leaving out the chicken.

This week's recipe's ingredients comes from Southern Spain where it is served in Tapas style restaurants. Tuna plays a huge role in the Mediterranean, particularly in Southern Spain and Southern Italy, both of which produce the best quality canned tuna in the world. Tuna is best eaten either raw or quickly seared and very rare, as it becomes tough and dense if cooked through.   

This week's recipe comes from Portugal. Feijoada is usually associated with black beans cooked in combination with pork or sausages (especially in Brazil), but in this case it is a combination of white beans and seafood. In Portugal it is usually served with steamed rice, but I have incorporated the rice into a one pot dish to give it more flavour. 

This week's recipe comes from from Andalucia in Southern Spain where it is served as a popular Tapas plate It is made with tiny prawns, usually unshelled, but these can be hard to find, so this recipe uses minced full size raw prawns. It's important to use whole fresh prawns because frozen peeled prawns lack flavour. When you have peeled the prawns and removed the heads, these can be frozen for future use to make a prawn stock for fish soup or rice dishes.

This week's recipe comes from Andalusia in Southern Spain. Located between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, it is no surprise that excellent quality fish and shellfish play a predominant role in the cuisine of this region. In the days before refrigeration, preserving fish by curing was a long established technique and to this day salt cod and smoked and salted tuna are extremely popular.

This week's recipe is another one from the Eastern side of the Mediterranean.  I recently ate this intriguingly named dish at the famous  Pandeli restaurant in Istanbul's Spice Bazaar.   It has nothing to do with harems, but legend has it that one of the Ottoman Sultans was travelling and in urgent need of food when his retinue  chanced upon a peasant cooking this very dish, which did indeed  delight him.  

This is an approximation of a dish I recently enjoyed in Istanbul, a city famous for excellent fish restaurants.    The version I ate was made without chickpeas but they add  flavour and texture that are complementary to the seafood. Wild caught sea bass is the best fish for this dish, but you can substitute any white fish such as Sea Bream or John Dory  for an equally enjoyable result. 

My travels recently took me to Istanbul, one of the most interesting and agreeable cities in the world.   It's the only major city in the world that straddles 2 continents, Europe and Asia, with 15 million people living on  the European side and 5 million on the Asian side separated by the Bosphorus. Turkish food has  much in common with Greek, Lebanese and other Middle Eastern cuisines, with a reliance on fresh seasonal produce, plentiful fruit and vegetables, and meat and fish often cooked simply over charcoal.  

Polenta is a type of porridge made from ground maize, and a staple in Northern Italy.  When it was first introduced from the New World it was considered a miracle food because it was easy to grow, cheap and plentiful.  Similar to the experience in  the southern US, it initially led to widespread pellagra, a deadly disease caused by niacin deficiency. 

This classic recipe is very popular throughout central Italy, and was featured in the Tuscany episode of Stanley Tucci's excellent "Searching for Italy" TV series. Rabbit is an inexpensive and delicious meat which is enjoyed throughout the Mediterranean.  If for some reason you don't like it, you could substitute thin escalopes of turkey breast to make a similar dish.   The trick with this recipe is to debone the rabbit carefully  so you have one flat piece of meat ideally with no tears or holes, so it forms a tight tube when stuffed and rolled.  

This week's recipe is a classic cucina povera dish  from the Salento region of Puglia, the "heel" of the "boot" of southern Italy.    Ciceri is latin for chickpea and tria is the name of a local ribbon shaped pasta.  Tria pasta can be difficult to find outside Salento, so the best alternative is either tagliatelle or maltagliati.   The pasta must be freshly made because an unusual twist to this recipe is that a small quantity of the pasta is deep fried, to add additional flavour and texture, similar to the use of fried breadcrumbs to replace expensive grated parmigiano.

Keisuke Matsushima is a Japanese chef who first came to France in 1997 to pursue his interest in food and wine.  In 2002 he opened his first restaurant in Nice, chosen because its mountain and ocean topography and pleasant climate reminded him of his native Fukuoka.  The restaurant is small, intimate and inviting.  As an interesting side note, it is located in the same building in central Nice's rue de France where national hero Jean Moulin ran an art gallery as a cover for his role as one of the top leaders of the French Resistance, before he was betrayed to the Gestapo in 1943.   

Smoking meat over charcoal is a cooking technique especially popular on the Eastern side of the Mediterranean, but this week's recipe originates in Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe (and is also synonymous with the southern United States). Brining  and smoking is a classic of way of tenderising and preserving cheap cuts of meat that are full of flavour.  

This week's recipe comes from the Eastern side of the Mediterranean. Moussaka is a baked dish of minced lamb with vegetables and béchamel sauce, and for all those who have despaired of a succession of stodgy and unappetising dishes both in Greece and abroad, this recipe is a revelation of lightness and flavour. This is in large part due to the addition of eggs to the béchamel sauce to give the final dish a soufflé like texture.

This is  a variation of the recipe for spaghetti alle vongole, which I cooked  when I had too much squid for another recipe. In this case I used the tentacles, but you can also  use a cleaned whole small squid finely diced into small squares.   There is a famous saying that squid needs either 1 minute or 1 hour cooking, with anything in between resulting in an unappetising rubberiness. 

Cannelloni are a thick tubular form of pasta, and one of the less common pasta dishes because they used to be quite fiddly to make. Happily, you can now find Italian brand dried cannelloni that do not require any pre-cooking, as they cook in their sauce. Meat cannelloni are more common, but this seafood version is elegant and luxurious.  It is a perfect dish for a special occasion, and makes a great starter before a main course such as…

As the name suggests, Guinea Fowl  originates in Africa and it is readily available in France and Italy. It tastes very similar to high quality chicken, with a slightly gamier flavour, and is cooked the same way.  I recently ate a version of this dish at the renowned  Arborina Relais Hotel's The Lab bistro restaurant, as a main course after a starter of taglierini pasta with white alba truffle sauce. 

I had this dish recently in the highly recommended Ristorante, a Micheline guide recommended establishment in the centre of Torino. Chestnuts have always played a huge role in Italian peasant society, a cash crop both to sell and  to provide sustenance, usually ground into flour to make a protein rich bread.  It is time consuming among and fiddly to roast and peel seasonal raw chestnuts, but the vacuum packed pre-cooked versions are readily available all year round and taste just as good.   

This week's recipe comes from the North African side of the Mediterranean. Couscous is a type of pasta made from finely ground durum wheat semolina, and is a staple across  the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia).  It is not difficult to make, using a sort of circular rubbing motion with grains of semolina and water, but for this recipe I recommend buying a good quality dried version. 

This week's recipe is another "sucrée-salée" (sweet and salty) variation of the famous caramelised apple based Tarte Tatin. The technique of caramelising the ingredients before putting a pastry cap on works especially well with chicory, its bitterness balanced by the sweetness of shallots and high quality aged balsamic vinegar. These tarts are often made with puff pastry, but I prefer to use home made all butter short crust pastry.

This week's recipe is unashamedly retro, wildly popular at dinner parties in the 1970s but deserving a comeback. The original Beef Stroganoff dates back to Russia in the late 1800s, created by a French chef who cooked this dish for his employer, Count Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov. According to legend, the good Count had dental problems that made chewing difficult, hence the very thin slicing of the beef.

The Arborina Relais hotel is in the heart of Barolo wine country, 14 kilometres from Alba in the Piemonte region. If you are visiting Alba during white truffle season, this hotel is a perfect blend of understated luxury, comfortable modern design, fine dining and very friendly and professional staff. The hotel has 2 restaurants, a first floor casual bistro called The Lab (which doubles up as the breakfast venue) and ground floor fine dining in the Osteria Arborino.

This week's recipe  is my version of a dish I ate recently in an excellent  restaurant called Bar des Oiseaux in Nice's old city. Until 1860 Nice was part of the Kingdom of Sardegna - Piemonte, a precursor of modern Italy,  and this dish is a classic example of the kind of Frano-Italian fusion food that is common in this area. 

This vegetable is a member of the chicory family that is very hard to find outside Italy,  and is generally only available between November and February.  Puntarelle are the new pointed shoots in the middle of the plant (photo below), before they grow into stalks and leaves with the look (and flavour) of dandelion.  I first heard of this dish a number of years ago from a taxi driver in Rome, and I was bemused that he was waxing so lyrically about a salad.

This week's recipe originates in Northern Italy, combing succulent lean veal with butter, wine and capers. It works best with French or Italian veal which is younger and more tender than veal sold in Australia. If veal is not your thing, you can substitute thinly sliced chicken breasts, which need to be cooked for an extra 2-3 minutes. Capers are the unripened green buds of the caper bush…