Mango and corn slaw with peanut tofu – jump to recipe. 

I’m often asked by friends what recipes I use for work lunch meals, and I have to admit I rarely prep food purely for lunch – it’s usually a dinner with excess leftovers. This is a prime example of that over summer. It may seem like a lot of chopping, but with a mandoline you can slice everything incredibly finely in 15 minutes tops  (a kitchen must – we have this one which is great and absolutely not sponsored).  The herbs are also key. Use as much as you like of coriander, Thai basil and either (or both!) regular mint or Vietnamese mint, depending on what’s available. The mango and corn slaw keeps well for around 3 days in the fridge, and the peanut tofu makes enough for 4-5 total serves. You can take it to work with extra avocado and Japanese mayo to make it fancy, and rice depending on hunger levels.  

A few more ideas for summery leftover dinner-to-work lunches:

• Make a Greek salad with chopped cos, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, feta, black olives and add tuna and/or chickpeas. Lots of cracked black pepper and salt. Dress with lemon juice and olive oil. 
• This pea, spinach and lemon risoni salad – add smoked salmon, use whatever green vegetables you have.
• Ottolenghi’s corn, pumpkin and feta salad with hummus
• Meera Sodha’s eggplant, green bean and thai basil stir fry
• Zucchini soba noodles with peanut tofu
• Zucchini ginger udon noodles
• Spring lemon, white bean, green beans and avocado salad 

And when there are no leftovers? I keep a stash of good toast in the freezer to pull out to make avocado toast at work (try adding feta or smoked salmon to be extra luxe). A lunch worth looking forward to is important, in my opinion.

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Tiramisu cake: jump to recipe here.

Tiramisu has been very of the moment over the last few years (or I’m just very late to the party). The standard iterations at Italian restaurants have paved the way for Embla’s chocolate ripple-misu, the restaurant drawer option, gelato messina’s many twists (matcha-misu, for example) and the very viral pistachio-misu versions. I have been equally guilty of asking my local café for 12 shots of espresso for my own (the best make-ahead crowd pleasing dinner party dessert, if you need convincing). This is it in cake form. The layers are a moist almond coffee cake, studded with tiny shards of chopped dark chocolate and soaked in a mix of espresso and kahlua. A very simple vanilla mascarpone cream and a dusting of cocoa finishes it off. Hopefully a welcome addition to the tiramisu repertoire. 

A few tips:

• I find it easiest to make the cake layers the evening before serving, although you could do the morning of if need be. The important thing is that they are completely cold before you layer with mascarpone.
• In these photos I have used 2 x 20cm cake tins, though I have also made it with 2 x 22cm cake tins which works equally well for a slightly flatter cake and a greater cake-cream ratio. Just watch the baking time as they cook especially quickly in the larger tins.
• For the coffee soak: straight up espresso is best for flavour, whether from your own coffee machine or the cafe down the road. Filter coffee and even plunger is a bit too watery. 
• The cake will soak up more espresso-kahlua than you think. I find it works best if the cakes are warm and the coffee is cold, or the coffee is still hot and the cakes are cold – if both are hot it can get too wet, and if both are cold it doesn’t soak in as well. 
• Be really careful when beating the mascarpone cream together, as it can go from perfect to grainy really quickly. I would actually take it to less whipped/slightly runnier than you think as it will even continue to thicken when you spread it on the cake. It just needs to be able to dollop. You can always put the cake in the fridge for a bit before serving too. 
  Let me know if you have any other questions! 

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Plum, orange and ricotta cake with almonds: jump to recipe here.

I would start with “finally, another recipe” but realistically long silences here have become the norm. My aspiration of regular weeknight recipes has remained aspirational – work-life balance is a work in progress. A long term goal, let’s say. This could quickly get personal but I think on this Sunday morning when my to-do list remains 20 points long we will stick to the recipe: a late summer plum, orange and ricotta cake. It is the sort of cake you put together in the morning when you realise people are popping over in a couple of hours, or need a vehicle for the not-quite-perfect stonefruit on the bench. Moist and bordering on cheesecake-like in the centre, it lasts well into the next day (although it may disappear before then).

It’s flexible – try nectarines or apricots, roast rhubarb in spring or maple poached pear in winter (just pre-bake hard fruit first). Don’t skip the flaked almonds and caster sugar on top if you can help it – it adds a sweet crust-like finish. Most importantly, don’t over bake it. This cake is much better slightly under done when the centre wobble is just disappearing: don’t be scared to remove it from the oven when a skewer inserted into the centre is still coated in crumbs. It will continue to cook and set as it cools, and is equally lovely served warm if your guests have already arrived. 

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Summer corn, nectarine and haloumi salad with fried zucchini, herbs and za-tar: jump to recipe here.

A record low single recipe here in 2023 – at least the bar for improvement is low. It’s not that I didn’t cook, but the cycle of study, exams and work meant time and motivation for recipe development and photos was missing. The rise of Instagram reels and Tiktok has resulted in a decline in traditional food blogging as it was when I started: many of my favourite bloggers have stopped all together, or switched medium to cookbooks, videos or pure social media content. 

I’m not quite ready to give it up yet. Food remains both a huge way to show love (dinner parties and birthday cakes are IN for 2024) and a creative outlet, and combining those here in this format of words + photo + recipe is the only way I can continue to squeeze it into life in a more permanent way than disappearing moments within a deep phone scroll. Maybe an optimistic statement – only time will tell whether this holds me slightly more accountable! 

This is the first of what will (hopefully) be a series of my favourite meals for weeknights or work lunches or dinner parties – mostly, for food with friends. It’s a summer corn, nectarine and haloumi salad, a favourite in the ‘fruit in salad’ category. The most important thing is perfectly ripe, juicy and sweet but not bruised or floury stone fruit. Nectarines or peaches ideally. Gooey haloumi fried at the last minute, smoky charred corn, fried zucchini for heft, lots of herbs and a lemon-y olive dressing make it a salad that can do it all: barbecue, pot luck, work lunch or quick dinner. Variants have been on repeat around here- use peaches and tomatoes if that’s what you’ve got, swap the haloumi for feta or a ball of burrata, use basil and shaved parmesan and add walnuts or pinenuts for a more Italian take.

If you’re looking for more summer recipe inspiration, here are my standouts for 2023: 

• Charred eggplant, tomato, tahini by Eden Grinshpan. Always a hit. See also her incredible roast sweet potatoes with sunflower seed and basil gremolata– we love a whole roast sweet potato moment.
• Ottolenghi’s fusion eggplant caponata with silken tofu – a classic in our lives at least. 
• My work lunches on repeat: lemon-y asparagus risoni salad (skip the salmon and use smoked instead for even more speed), zucchini soba noodles with miso salmon, corn or mango slaw with peanut tofu. 
• Ricotta gnudi with cherry tomato sauce: the friends dinner or date dinner you never knew you needed- mostly for the way you can get all cleaned up while it finishes off in the oven. And the mandatory sourdough for moping it up. 

And just because reading has made a post exam comeback, my favourite reads of 2023:

• Lola in the Mirror, Trent Dalton: the only one that for me has come close to Boy Swallows Universe (or surpassed?!).
• Birnham Wood, Eleanor Catton: writing like The Luminaries, but a environmental thriller set in small town New Zealand. Creepy and I loved it. 
• Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver. 10/10
• Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin: don’t let the initial gaming chapters put you off if you’re not a gaming person!
• Good Material, Dolly Alderton: not my favourite in the first half, but Dolly Alderton realllyyy has a way with words and that second half made it worth it. 
• Crushing, Genevieve Novak: contemporary Melbourne 20s/30s life in a novel. Almost a Sally Rooney-esque feel. 
• Love and Virtue, Diana Reed.

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Passionfruit, lemon and olive oil cake, otherwise known as sunshine in cake form. Jump to recipe here.

IIt’s difficult to believe it has been a year since my last post here – thank you to the friends who reminded me that the pear chocolate crumble had sat at the top of the homepage for too long. My only excuse is study. The physician exams I sat this year were undeniably harder than anticipated or could imagine. Everyone told us to expect the most challenging period of medical training we may ever face, but you still had to dive into it with the assumption that you’d be fine – or it would be too daunting to ever start. It already feels like there is very little choice in the matter: you’ve come this far, right? You got into medical school, you got through your university exams, you started working (which got easier and more satisfying), you found an area you loved with a future you could imagine, and this was just the mandatory next step on the road there. Unsurprisingly, studying full time on top of work drained a lot of the fun out of it. We are still sitting in the unfortunate anxious period of not having exam results yet, which is a black hole where every time you accidentally relive exam day you deduct another 10% from your imaginary mark. Best avoided if possible. Maybe I’ll look back at this with rosier tinted lenses on the other side!

When you’re exhausted it’s hard to have the emotional capacity or time to be creative, so baking went mostly by the wayside. I still cooked enough to feed myself – salmon dill and lemon risoni salads (a riff on this recipe) into too many tupperware containers, zucchini and melty goats cheese frittatas after work, eggplant tomato spaghetti dolloped with ricotta and showered in parmesan for pre-exam comfort. And it was friends who got me through it more than anything else: Lilli with home cooked Ottolenghi on the days I arrived home late and frazzled; Chloe for shared commiserations and study sessions over tubs of Luther’s scoops croissant and honey ice cream; Marnie for long run debriefs followed by butter drenched fruit toast (Wildlife is the winner); Anna and Eleanor with the frequent work escape long blacks; the best study group friends for pizza and wines and sharing the load – to name only a few. Mum and Dad always on the other end of the phone to listen.  

My window for complaints though is rapidly closing. I am typing this from a cafe in Paris (!), eating a slice of cherry studded clafoutis (from Gramme, would highly recommend), golden topped and densely creamy (and now at the top of my list to recreate next summer). I was lucky to get my mandatory 5 week block of annual leave now, after exams, so have joined the mass exodus of Australians and New Zealanders to sunnier climates. You can follow along over here for more of the holiday photographs if you like. 

In the meantime, this lemon, passionfruit and olive oil cake is pure sunshine in cake form. It’s zesty and fragrant, light and fluffy but still stays moist for days with both the yogurt and oil. It’s based on a cake we made when I was growing up frequently – the easiest one bowl people-pleasing cake in the repertoire with a side of nostalgia. The bundt tin allows a large capacity and means it cooks very evenly (it’s a versatile tin and makes the easiest afternoon tea cakes – would recommend if you don’t have one). Just make sure to grease your tin well and turn the cake out after about 5-10 minutes cooling time to ensure no sticking. 

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