Good Cooking Every Day by Julia Busuttil Nishimura
Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s latest cookbook Good Cooking Every Day celebrates simple home cooking—creating memorable meals, no matter the time or place.
Photography: Armelle Habib
Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s food is influenced by her Maltese heritage, the ebb and flow of the seasons, and by her time spent living in Tuscany, where she learned the joys of the Italian kitchen.
Ricotta stracciatella gelato from Good Cooking Everyday.
“Even if a dish or meal is thrown together at the last minute, it should always be intentional.”
Good Cooking Every Day by Julia Busuttil Nishimura is out now.
Almond crumble cake with peach & blackberry in the making.
Julia Busuttil Nishimura is one of Australia's best-loved food personalities, renowned for her generous, uncomplicated, seasonal cooking.
Julia’s latest cookbook, Good Cooking Every Day, is all about simple food and creating memorable meals. The collection of recipes includes a guide to creating menus for any occasion; from a celebration of summer produce to pure comfort food in cooler weather, a simple family dinner to a relaxed lunch with friends.
Julia pairs ingredients in harmonious and delicious ways, with recipes for every season, including pasta alla norcina, Italian flat beans with mint and ricotta salata, olive oil loaf cake and tomato tart with capers and herbs.
'Every meal is something to celebrate—a casual gathering with friends, a weeknight dinner, a long birthday lunch in the garden. It doesn't matter what the occasion, there is an unspoken joy in sharing food with others.'
Below we share a recipe from the new cookbook: Lunettes.
This is an edited extract from Good Cooking Every Day by Julia Busuttil Nishimura—published by Pan Macmillan Australia. Purchase the book online now here.
Lunettes from Good Cooking Every Day—recipe shared below.
Crumbed fish with yoghurt tartare & soft potato buns from Good Cooking Every Day.
LUNETTES
My simple sablé recipe forms the base for these gorgeous French biscuits. Lunettes translates to ‘glasses’ or ‘spectacles’, and while they don’t need to be this exact shape, they do look lovely. I make a straightforward raspberry jam, flavoured with a little basil, which brings a subtle herbaceousness to the finished biscuits. Any good-quality, store-bought jam will work well, too.
Makes 12
INGREDIENTS
250 g (12⁄3 cups) plain flour
150 g cold unsalted butter, cubed
80 g caster sugar
pinch of sea salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
1 egg
pure icing sugar, sifted, to serve
RASPBERRY JAM
400 g raspberries
300 g caster sugar
2 basil sprigs
juice of 1⁄2 lemon
METHOD
For the raspberry jam, mash the raspberries and caster sugar together in a saucepan. Add the basil and stir well until the sugar has dissolved. Bring to the boil over a medium–high heat, skimming any foam that rises to the surface. Add the lemon juice and continue to cook until the jam reaches 103–104°C on an instant-read thermometer. Ladle the jam into a warm sterilised jar, seal and allow to cool. Due to the jam’s low sugar percentage (usually jam has a 1:1 ratio of fruit to sugar), this jam should be stored in the fridge and used within a week.
Place the flour, butter, caster sugar and salt in a food processor and pulse to a fine crumb. Add the vanilla and egg and continue to pulse until the dough begins to look damp and is coming together. Turn out onto a clean work surface and shape into a disc. Wrap in plastic wrap or baking paper and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Line two baking trays with baking paper.
Roll the dough out between two pieces of baking paper until 3–4 mm thick. Cut out the biscuits using a fluted almond-shaped cutter about 10 cm in size. Reroll the scraps and cut out more biscuits, so you have 24 in total. Use a 2 cm round cutter (I use a piping bag tip) to cut two rounds in half of the biscuits (to make the ‘lunettes’). Transfer the biscuits to the trays and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 180°C fan-forced.
Bake the biscuits for 10–12 minutes or until lightly golden. Allow to cool.
Spread the jam on the biscuit bases without holes and top each with a cut out ‘lunette’ biscuit, sandwiching the jam between the biscuit layers. Dust with the icing sugar and serve.