The ‘utterly delicious’ one-pan chicken dish Julia Busuttil Nishimura cooks every week

A lemony tomato and bean broth. Spaghetti served with broad bean and basil pesto. A seasonal salad with fig, sugar snap peas and halloumi. For Julia Busuttil Nishimura, everyday cooking goes beyond tangible elements such as simplicity and deliciousness.

It’s also about the ebb and flow of seasons, sitting together around the table after the meal has finished or foraging through the pantry for favourite ingredients. It can even be about things as ordinary as messy benchtops, too many dishes and another trip to the shops.

“It is beautiful and life-enhancing and needn’t be complicated,” she writes in the introduction of her latest cookbook.

The collection, Simple Pleasures, is dedicated to the joy of cooking that punctuates our day-to-day life, and is filled with the types of pared-back recipes for which Busuttil Nishimura has become known.

It includes a chapter dedicated to pasta, as well as sections about soups, vegetables and salads, plus lots of homemade bakes, both sweet and savoury. Chicken dinners (many one-pan or equally easy and simple to make) are a perennial favourite, and feature heavily throughout.

“Try not to overthink it all – just be at home in the kitchen, making effortless yet elegant food to share with the people you care about most,” she writes.

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Here, Busuttil Nishimura shares three essential chicken recipes, including a one-pan Thai-inspired dinner, a spiced dish dotted with pomegranate and a salad with ranch dressing.

This Thai-inspired, flavour-packed chicken dish is a wonderful one-pan dinner. Between the marinade, which is punchy, sweet and salty, and the coriander and spring onion sauce, which has some kick to it, it really is utterly delicious. Served with some fluffy steamed jasmine rice, I could and often do, eat this every week.

Coriander and spring onion sauce

I love how burnished this chicken becomes thanks to the pomegranate molasses. It’s sweet, a little sour and heady with spices, and is very much inspired by the flavours of the Persian chicken stew fesenjoon. The overnight marinade is very worthwhile, but even a few hours will give a good depth of flavour.

Spiced pomegranate molasses marinade

Pomegranate, walnut and herb salad

The first time I tried ranch dressing was at my local pizza place, where they serve small bowls of it on the side of your pizza to dip your crusts in. It’s rich and creamy but with a good amount of zing and freshness from the herbs. It happens to make a really good dressing for a poached chicken salad too. Here, with crunchy croutons and quick pickled onions, it has everything I love.

This is an edited extract from Simple Pleasures by Julia Busuttil Nishimura, published by Plum, RRP $44.99. Photography by Armelle Habib.

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