Recipes

The pub bistro's best seller, cooked in your own kitchen for a fraction of the price

There's a reason scotch fillet with creamy mushroom sauce never comes off the pub menu — it's the steak-and-sauce combination that pleases absolutely everyone. And here's the good news: it's genuinely a 25-minute dinner. The marbling through a scotch keeps it juicy while it sears, and the same pan gives you a glossy mushroom sauce in the time the steak takes to rest. One steak, one pan, and a dinner that tastes like someone else did the cooking.

Chops, spuds and beans in one pan — and about four minutes of washing up

The trick to a real one-pan dinner is the order of operations. Brown the chops first, so the lamb fat flavours everything that follows. Potatoes into that same fat, cut-side down. A splash of stock, a lid on, and the pan does the work while you set the table. The chops go back on top at the end with the beans, so nothing overcooks and every drop of flavour ends up in the pan juices. Fifty minutes, one pan, dinner done — that's the whole pitch, really.

Sunday lamb on a Wednesday — the slow cooker does the shift while you're at work

Here's the quiet trick with the roast in your lamb share: it doesn't need a Sunday. Ten minutes before you leave in the morning — onions in the base, lamb on top, stock around the sides, lid on low. When you walk back in at six, the house smells like your nan's place and the lamb pulls apart with two forks. The gravy makes itself from the juices while the meat rests. Pull-apart roast lamb, midweek, with one pot to wash. That's not a compromise. That's just good planning.

The broth that makes itself while you get on with life

This is the least demanding recipe in the whole library. Bones, water, a splash of vinegar, and a slow cooker doing all the work while you sleep. That's it. Every generation before ours knew that the bones were where the flavour lived — the stockpot sat at the back of the stove and dinner got built out of it all week. The slow cooker is just the modern version of that back burner. Ten minutes of effort tonight, and tomorrow you've got litres of golden lamb broth ready to start soups, gravies and better pots of rice.

One temperature, one timing rule, and the roast you were nervous about is done

Plenty of good cooks have stood in front of a 1.4kg roast and quietly panicked. It's a lot of beef to get wrong. So here's the version with all the decisions already made: one oven temperature, one timing rule, a cheap meat thermometer as the referee, and a pan gravy built from the juices while the beef rests. No searing, no basting, no turning. Follow it once and the Sunday roast stops being an occasion you attempt and becomes a thing you simply do.

Steak night on a school night — 25 minutes, and none of the shortcuts show

There's a version of steak night that waits for the weekend, and then there's this one. The BBQ steak is the everyday griller in your pack — the one you don't save for an occasion. While it sizzles in a smoking-hot pan, a bakery baguette turns into proper garlic bread in the oven, and a bag of slaw gets a two-minute dressing that beats anything from a bottle. Twenty-five minutes from fridge to table, and every plate looks like Friday.

One steak, two people, zero arguments

A 500g T-bone is really two steaks sharing a bone — a strip of sirloin on one side, a piece of fillet on the other. That makes it the fairest steak dinner going, if you carve it right. Cook it hot, rest it well, then take both muscles off the bone, slice them across the grain and deal them out so each plate gets some of each: the sirloin's flavour and chew, the fillet's butter-soft give. With a sharp rocket salad and good bread, that's dinner for two settled — and nobody drew the short straw.

The pub classic, without leaving the house

There's a reason steak, chips and salad has never come off a pub menu anywhere in Australia. It works. And the steak the pubs reach for is usually rump — big flavour, honest price, and at 320g it splits between two for a proper plate each. This is the no-thinking Friday ritual: chips in the oven, one screaming-hot grill pan, a salad you could make with your eyes closed. The only skill involved is patience at the end, because rump rewards a long rest like no other steak. No booking required.

A pantry raid tonight, a pasta sauce tomorrow

Every ingredient in this one is either in your pantry right now or lasts for months in it — a bottle of passata, dried herbs, an onion, a spoon of sugar. The shanks go in raw, the sauce goes over the top, and eight hours later you've got lamb sliding off the bone in a rich tomato sugo that tastes like it simmered on an Italian nonna's stove all day. Which, in a way, it did. The bonus round: whatever sauce is left becomes tomorrow night's pasta dinner, and it might be the better meal of the two.