Recipes

Bright, sour and crunchy where lamb dinners are usually heavy

Sumac is the secret handshake of Lebanese cooking — a dried berry, ground to a deep red powder, that tastes like lemon decided to become a spice. Rubbed onto loin chops before a hard sear, it forms a tangy crust that makes grass-fed lamb sing. Underneath goes fattoush, the great bread salad of Lebanon: crisp shards of flatbread, cos, cucumber, tomato, radish and a small hillside of mint and parsley, all tossed at the last second so nothing surrenders its crunch. It's the lamb dinner for a warm evening, and it eats like sunshine.

Sweet earth, salty cheese, pink lamb — the cafe plate you can do at home

There's a reason every good cafe has run some version of this plate: beetroot's sweetness and feta's salt were made to argue over lamb, and the lamb wins every time. This is a composed dinner rather than a toss-everything salad — wedges of beetroot roasted until their edges caramelise, a sharp honey-vinegar dressing, rocket, walnuts, and four charred cutlets propped on top. Most of the hour is the beetroot quietly roasting while you do something else. It turns one pack of cutlets into a dinner for two that looks like you ordered it.

Bright, bold, and better than anything you'll order in a restaurant

Thai beef salad — yam nua — is one of the most vivid, flavourful salads in the world. Thinly sliced cooked beef dressed in lime, fish sauce, chilli, and toasted rice powder, scattered with fresh mint and coriander. The key is to cook the beef to medium-rare and slice it very thin. The round, when treated correctly, is ideal — its clean, lean flavour lets the dressing take centre stage without competing.

A main-course salad with genuine substance and serious flavour

Warm beef salad sits in that ideal space between a proper dinner and a light meal — substantial enough to feel like a main course, fresh enough to feel virtuous. The topside steak, pan-seared and sliced thin, works beautifully here: its lean, clean flavour is a perfect counterpoint to the bitterness of rocket and the sweetness of roasted capsicum.

Bold, fresh, bright — a 20-minute dinner that punches well above its weight

Larb is a Thai and Laotian minced meat salad seasoned with fish sauce, lime, toasted rice powder, and fresh herbs. It is one of those dishes that is simultaneously the simplest thing you can make and one of the most flavourful. The toasted rice powder — made from dry-toasting raw rice in a pan until golden, then grinding — is the secret ingredient that gives larb its nutty, slightly smoky depth.