Sauces can make the simple sublime. Whether they’re sweet or savoury, basic or complex, based on butter, oil or purée, they dress our meat and vegetables to create a memorable dish. Here are my favourite sauce recipes.
Open Fillo Sandwich with Anchovy Sauce This simple dish is inspired by one of my favourite MG Garage starters. I love the idea of sandwiching chopped olives between 2 sheets of fillo and wonder what else might work in this way. Janni used to make a triple stack of the olive-studded fillo sheets with the […]
Quesadillas with Mexican Salsa Verde I love recipes that are so simple they’re hardly a recipe at all – where great produce and flavours shine and I don’t have to do too much. That’s what these simple fried cheese sandwiches are all about, especially served with vibrant green salsa verde. Salsa verde simply means ‘green […]
Snails in Garlic Butter Escargots à la Bourguignonne. Is there anything more French than escargot? In this classic dish from Burgundy, the snails are really just a vehicle for the delicious garlic and herb butter, so ensure you have plenty of crusty bread to soak it all up. Ideally you’ll have special snail plates and […]
Chicken in Half Mourning This is my version of poulet demi-deuil, a classic French dish made by placing shaved black truffles under the skin of a chicken, resembling the veil of a woman in mourning. It seems that the appearance is only ‘half mourning’ because some of the bird’s white flesh is still seen; full […]
Hainanese Chicken Rice I’ve always loved this dish, especially the delicious ginger and green onion sauce, so I thought I’d give it a try and discovered it’s surprisingly easy (especially with a few tips from the brilliant Tony Tan). It takes a few hours, but most of that is just resting time. There are a […]
Deep-Fried Ice Cream Like this recipe? You’ll love my online Chinese cooking class inspired by Andy Evans of Spice Temple! Like most Anglo-Celtic Aussies growing up in the 1970s, Chinese was the first foreign food I ever tasted and, at the time, frying ice cream was about as exotic a thing as I could imagine. […]
Duck a l’Orange I love this easy version of the classic duck à l’orange. It’s inspired by Pierre Koffman’s recipe for wild duck in orange sauce in Memories of Gascony and is simpler than most because it doesn’t require stock, just fresh orange juice. When they’re in season, I love to use Peter Dryden’s Poorman’s […]
Grilled Asapagus with Sauce Maltaise Like this recipe? You’ll love my online French cooking class featuring the Food of Provence! Spring brings so many wonderful ingredients together, including two of my favourites, new season asparagus and blood oranges – and I love to combine them in this dish. Being one of the classic ‘mother sauces’ […]
Gorgonzola & Walnut Sauce with Lumache Like this recipe?You’ll love my online Italian cooking class featuring the food of northern Italy! I first had this sauce many years ago in an Italian restaurant in Glebe. I remember writing a letter (no email back then) to the chef asking if he’d share the recipe, but he […]
Easy Sauce Béarnaise Sauce Béarnaise is the classic accompaniment to roast beef. It’s named for Béarn in southwestern France, the birthplace of Henri IV, although the rather tenuous connection seems to be that it was created around 1830 at a Parisian restaurant called Pavilion Henri IV, rather than any association with Béarn itself. Correctly it’s […]
