It’s rare to find an Australian household without a dog-eared, sauce-marked copy of one of Donna Hay’s recipe books. With her fresh ingredients and no-fuss attitude, the prolific cookbook author and food stylist has not only epitomised modern Australian cooking, but helped define it.
Too Easy is Hay’s 28th cookbook and, in her own words, one of her “easiest books to date”.
It might seem like a big statement from someone who’s already made a career out of simple recipes, but Too Easy takes Hay’s signature style of cooking one step further with its willingness to evolve with the times.
With chapters such as ‘Honey, I bought an air fryer’ and ‘Faster than takeaway,’ Hay’s new cookbook continues to demonstrate her innate understanding of the evolving needs of modern Australian families — especially working mothers — and the never-ending challenge of getting a healthy meal on the table.
“I, like everyone else, face the ‘What’s for dinner?’ question,” she says. “I love to cook, but for me it’s just deciding what I am going to cook.
“You can’t have it be a anti-experience — it’s dinner and we all know how important it is to sit down as a family, especially when you’ve got kids. They start to decompress over dinner and all of a sudden everyone starts chatting.”
Hay’s secret to success may lie in the fact that while she’s one Australia’s most famous cookbook writers, she’s also a mother who understands these challenges first-hand.
“My kids love lasagne, but am I going to make it for them? I don’t think I’ve made them lasagne in honestly 10 years,” Hay admits.
“I always think I’m going to make two huge baking dishes on the weekend — really good intentions — and put it in the freezer. I always think I’m going to be that mum, but I just never get to it.”
While parents can breathe a sigh of relief that even Hay isn’t whipping up gourmet meals for her kids every week, this universal parenting experience is so much of what informs her recipe creation, with the author basing the success of a recipe on whether it could actually convince a working parent that it’s a good idea to come home and cook it.
“The juice needs to be worth the squeeze,” Hay says. “I can promise you, it’s not going to take all your time and you’re not going to finish with a load of dishes.”
Inside Donna Hay’s Too Easy
From an incredibly easy one-pan ‘undone lasagne’ that caters to her boys’ love of the more time-consuming dish to a béchamel-free macaroni and cheese, Hay’s newest book is giving parents permission to take the shortcuts.
“I’ve tried to take a shortcut on everything,” Hay says. “We worked out that you can simmer macaroni in milk and it makes the most silky, velvety sauce, so you don’t have to make a béchamel sauce to make mac and cheese.”
In a similar way, the Too Easy’s ‘Faster than takeaway’ chapter is a fun take on the classic Uber Eats menu with easy pizzas, five-minute Thai green curries and tasty noodle dishes, while her new air-fryer recipes embrace everyone’s favourite kitchen appliance.
“I buckled to my children,” Hay admits of her air fryer. “My boys kept coming to me with videos from TikTok asking. ‘Can we make this?'”
While Hay isn’t entirely sold on the appliance (she refuses to stick a whole chicken in it), she does admit that it has its uses.
“It does actually crisp up really well, so it does have its purpose,” Hay says, pointing out the book’s delicious air-fryer pork belly bites and salt and pepper tofu recipes.
While plenty of Hay’s new recipes cater to family tastes, there are also recipes that satisfy Hay’s love of flavourful salads — her chosen meal when she’s just cooking for herself.
“I’m quite happy with a simple kind of veggie bowl — that would be my thing when there’s no one challenging me about how much veg they have to eat,” Hay laughs. “I love a salad that’s really layered with flavour.”
Hay may have mastered the concept of ‘easy’ home cooking, but the expectations of Australia’s home cooks are only growing.
Whether it’s fuelled by social media or a changing food culture, Hay is finding that more people want their food to “taste like a restaurant meal [and] look like a restaurant meal, but have 20 minutes and eight ingredients in front of them”.
Luckily, she isn’t put off by the challenges, and as Australia’s food world evolves, she’s determined to evolve with it.
“I’m getting sharper and sharpening my craft to meet their demands,” Hay says. “It’s nice to have a challenge every time you sit down to a book.”
Buy Donna Hay’s Too Easy
This article originally appeared on Home Beautiful and is republished here with permission.
