Recipes

One tray, four chops, and potatoes cooked in lamb fat

Some dinners are good because of what you do to them. This one's good because of what you don't. Potatoes and red onion get a head start in a hot oven, then the forequarter chops go on top and do the rest of the work for you — as they roast, their fat drips down and turns the potatoes underneath into the best version of themselves. One tray, no decisions, and the washing-up is a chopping board and a fork. It's the dinner we cook when the day has already taken everything else out of us.

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.

Set it before work, shred it at six, let the table do the rest

The best family dinners are the ones where everyone builds their own. Ten minutes before you leave in the morning, the diced beef goes into the slow cooker with smoky spices, onion and a can of tomatoes — that's the entire job. By dinnertime it pulls apart at the touch of a fork. Put out bowls of rice and beans, set the beef in the middle of the table, and watch the fussiest eater in the house serve themselves like it was their idea all along.

The steak sanga your local wishes it made

Every decent pub in the country hangs its hat on a steak sandwich, and the trick has always been the steak itself — thin, tenderised, cooked hard and fast so you can bite through it cleanly. That's exactly what topside minute steaks are. The caramelised onions are the only part that asks for patience; everything else is a fierce pan, good bread, and the full complement of beetroot, tomato and lettuce. Dinner for four in forty minutes, and nobody has to queue at the bar for it.

Sweet, tangy, a little bit cheeky — the simmer sauce that never left

Devilled sausages sound more dramatic than they are. The "devil" is just a tangy-sweet tomato sauce with a bit of mustard bite — the kind of thing your grandmother could make with her eyes closed. Browned sausages finish cooking gently in that sauce with apple and onion, and by the time it all lands on the mash, five sausages have somehow become a saucy dinner for four with ladles to spare. Second week of the month and the pack's still in the freezer? This is its moment.

Golden crumb, tomato, ham and molten cheese — schnitzel's big Latin cousin

In Argentina, milanesa isn't a treat, it's a food group — and round is the cut the whole tradition is built on. Lean, wide and even, it crumbs up flat and fries golden without a single fat pocket to lift the coating. The napolitana treatment takes it one glorious step further: tomato sauce, folds of ham and a blanket of mozzarella melted under the grill. It's a proper Friday-night cook — a bit of crumbing, a bit of frying — and the payoff is the kind of dinner that gets requested by name.

The great Australian dinner, baked in your own kitchen

Ask an Australian what smells like Saturday arvo, and half of us will say a meat pie. But the proper one — rich minced-beef gravy, a shortcrust base, a puff lid brushed gold — has mostly disappeared from home kitchens. Let's bring it back. One 480g pack of grass-fed beef mince, a bit of patience while the filling cools, and you've got a family-sized pie that beats anything handed over in a paper bag. Sauce on top is not optional in this house.

The market-stall queue-maker, from your own frying pan

If you've ever stood twenty deep in the queue at a show or a Saturday market while gozleme got rolled and flipped on a hot plate, you already know why this recipe exists. Here's the good news: the dough is just flour, yoghurt and salt — no yeast, nothing trickier than a half-hour rest — and the filling is spiced lamb mince, wilted spinach and creamy feta. Roll it thin, fold it over, and cook until blistered and gold. Squeeze lemon over the top, cut into wedges, and listen for the crunch.

Heat on one side of the plate, cool on the other — the oldest trick in North Africa

Two condiments. That's the entire distance between plain grilled chops and something people ask about. Harissa — the smoky North African chilli paste that lives in the supermarket's international aisle these days — gets twenty minutes to work into the lamb before the grill pan does its thing. And on the other side of the plate, yoghurt stirred through with mint and lemon, there to catch the heat the moment it lands. Loin chops carry a spice crust better than any other chop, and the whole dinner is on the table in forty minutes.