Home Food

Forget perfection! Home Food delivers simple, comforting, sometimes nostalgic, always proudly imperfect family eating – from weeknight ease to weekend pottering

When being tired and hungry is the default setting of adult life, we crave comfort over complexity. That's the ethos of Home Food: real, delicious, achievable family food, hold the garnish. Food columnist and recipe writer Elizabeth Hewson's approach is all scaling down what cooking should be, so it can be nourishing and still enjoyable – less pressure, more ease.

These are recipes that don't chase trends, viral moments, or complicated techniques. From an It's going to be OK midweek chicken stew, to a Soup for exhausted people (a real dump-and-simmer tomato and chicken heartener), to a whole chapter of one-pots and a range of midweek pastas – these recipes are for people living real, imperfect lives— the ones caught in the relentless rhythm of daily life.

So what should Home Food really be? Flexible, permissive recipes 'with give', in case you don't have something at home and just need to get on with it. Sometimes you just need to throw something together, or one pot is the max that is going to get cleaned; or sometimes trying a little harder on the weekend, so you can batch for next week; and sometimes, well, you just want pasta followed by pudding.

Including plenty of veg-forward recipes, plenty of tips and tricks for making the most of your precious moments in the kitchen, and delivered with the signature Hewson elegant ease, this is the book for when dinner needs to just be dinner – with a little nourishing nostalgia along the way.

About the Author

Elizabeth Hewson is a wearer of many aprons – a home cook, recipe writer, columnist, author, creator of the #SaturdayNightPasta movement and former head of creative at Australian hospitality group, Fink. Her love of food and storytelling began in 2013 with her first book, Moving Out…Eating In, a cookbook for home leavers. Her second book, Saturday Night Pasta, was published in 2020 at the height of the pandemic-induced pasta-from-scratch boom. At the same time, she created self-care fresh food packs, a side hustle that has grown into a range of award-winning sauces and dried pastas that are stocked in hundreds of stores around Australia.

In 2023, she joined The Weekend Australian Magazine as their resident home cooking food columnist. In Home Food, Hewson has applied formidable zeal to the creation of a simple, original collection of recipes that is immune to algorithm-driven trends and instead truly reflects how modern families cook and eat today. Lizzie lives in Sydney's inner west with her husband and two young children.