Accountant-turned-recipe writer Nagi Maehashi, the “voice, cook and eater” behind the RecipeTin Eats website , is on a mission to solve the “what can we have for dinner?” dilemma. Her first cookbook, Dinner , was the top-selling book in Australia last year, and her new cookbook, Tonight , will hit the shelves on October 15. As a busy woman (Maehashi also runs RecipeTin Meals, a food bank that has donated more than 270,000 free meals to Sydney’s vulnerable), she has found that herbs and spices take a meal from meh to marvellous.
Spices are so important to her cooking that for Tonight she whittled down her list to a “top 13” (why stop at 10?) that work across almost every type of cuisine. “I literally created a matrix to come up with my most in-demand spices,” she says. “I wrote the spices down one side and I gave it an extra tick in every recipe it appeared.
” RecipeTin’s easy, cheesy one-pot pizza mac, plus two more dishes from her upcoming book She buys most of her spices from the supermarket, eschewing loyalty to any particular brand and choosing whichever is on special that day. “I want my recipes to be accessible, and I just want to make sure my recipes taste good with those everyday spices from a supermarket,” she says. Maehashi decants any spices not already packaged in well-sealed glass jars into airtight containers or jars to prevent moisture getting in and retain freshness.
Her Kmart jars and Bunnings spice rack take prime possie on the kit.
