1 week Ago By Adam Liaw
Home cooking isn’t as time-consuming or difficult as many people believe, cookbook author and TV host Adam Liaw believes. In the time it might take us to order a takeaway or home-delivered dinner, we could usually whip up a simple, healthy family meal. “It is absolutely possible to make quick meals that are nutritious and also taste delicious.
In fact, it’s not just possible – it’s what normal cooking was for centuries,” he writes in his latest recipe collection, Time for Dinner. The cookbook shines the light on quick woks, “under 10s” and recipes that cut back on washing, chopping and shopping. Here’s four to try at home.
Baked Tuscan chicken If you want an endorsement for this dish, here’s one from my seven-year-old daughter, Anna. Her review: “Wow, Dad! That’s actually pretty great!” INGREDIENTS METHOD Serves 6 Tip: A good rule of thumb is that if a dish has the name of a place in the title, it’s not from that place. This is no exception.
It’s an American dish, and it’s named “Tuscan chicken” presumably because of the Italian-ish ingredients and the fact that Tuscany has kind of a nice vibe. Cook Adam Liaw’s juicy version of this cult TikTok chicken dish and prepare to be proposed to Tomato and capsicum penne A simple tomato pasta is fantastic as it is – simply cooked tomato passata (pureed tomatoes) tossed with pasta and olive oil and finished with parmesan and perhaps a bit of basil. But if you want to level that up a little, this blended sauce of capsicum and tomato is a great choice.
INGREDIENTS Smoked paprika oil (makes extra) METHOD Serves 4-6 Tip: Don’t skip the smoked paprika oil. Flavoured oils are one of the easiest ways to add flavour to a meal, and you could use this for all kinds of things, from drizzling over barbecued prawns (shrimp) to adding an accent to a salad. Mushroom cacciatore Cacciatore is a “hunter”-style braise popularly made with chicken or rabbit, but there’s not a lot of hunting that goes into this mushroom version.
INGREDIENTS Polenta METHOD Serves 4 Tip: Microwaving your mushrooms is a great time saver. This method collapses the air spaces in the mushrooms so they don’t absorb too much oil and can fry much more quickly. Adam Liaw’s chicken cacciatore is the Italian-Aussie classic everyone needs in their repertoire Beef pad see ew Pad see ew is just one of a number of flat rice noodle dishes around South-East Asia, like char kwai teow and beef chow fun, that taste best with a bit of wok hei (the breath of a wok) to them.
My advice is to heat the noodles (using hot water or a microwave) so they don’t suck too much heat from the wok, and only cook one serving at a time. INGREDIENTS Marinade Pad see ew sauce METHOD Serves 4 Tip: Golden Mountain sauce is a savoury seasoning used in Thai and other South-East Asian cooking. It’s similar to Maggi seasoning so you could substitute that instead.
Why your wok should be red hot to master Adam Liaw’s stir-fried noodles, aka char kwai teow This is an edited extract from Time for Dinner by Adam Liaw, published by Hardie Grant Books, RRP $49.99.
