Libum is one of the oldest written recipes in Western culinary history. Recorded by Marcus Porcius Cato the Elder in De Agri Cultura around 160 BCE, this ancient Roman cheese flatbread requires three ingredients and has not changed in over two thousand years. A ritual offering to the household gods — lares and penates — it was also everyday food for Roman commoners. The recipe belongs to the ancient cuisine of Rome that anyone can recreate at home without adaptation. Relevant for anyone interested in ancient recipes, paleo diet history, Roman culinary tradition, and ancestral cooking. Served hot with honey, it transforms from a neutral dense cake into something that tastes unmistakably of antiquity.

50 min220 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian💪High protein

🇫🇷FranceAdvanced

Meat Dishes

Beef Bourguignon

Tender pieces of beef stewed in red wine with vegetables, mushrooms and aromatic herbs. A classic of slow cooking that creates a unique taste and aroma.

165 min600 kcal4 serves

💪High protein

🇮🇱IsraelAdvanced

Breakfast and Brunch

Shakshuka

Eggs poached directly in a spiced tomato and pepper sauce. One pan, 30 minutes. The sauce does most of the work — build it properly and the eggs finish themselves.

30 min230 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian⚡Quick🌶️Spicy

🇺🇸USAAdvanced

Flour and Confectionery Products

Banana Bread

The beloved American quick bread — ultra-moist, deeply banana-flavored loaf with a caramelized crust. The secret is using very ripe, almost black bananas and browning the butter first.

75 min310 kcal10 serves

🌿Vegetarian

🇺🇸USAMedium

Meat Dishes

Marry Me Chicken

Chicken breasts seared to a golden crust and finished in the oven in a creamy sauce with sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, and Parmesan. A staple of American home cooking that went viral worldwide for its simplicity and depth of flavor.

35 min520 kcal4 serves

💪High protein🌾Gluten-free🌶️Spicy

Weekly meal plan

Seven days of dinner, handled.

Set your calorie target and dietary preferences. Get a balanced week of recipes — breakfast, lunch, dinner — shoppable list included. Regenerate anytime.

Plan my week

Browse by diet

Seven ways to eat. Filter the archive by what matters for your kitchen — vegetarian, keto, gluten-free, the usual honest labels.

Keto Vegetarian Vegan High protein Gluten-free Spicy Quick

World cuisines

Eight home kitchens the author has cooked in. Flags tell the truth, the recipes do too.

USA145 recipes found France66 recipes found Italy58 recipes found Russia51 recipes found Japan26 recipes found India18 recipes found Mexico18 recipes found China16 recipes found

Editor's picksby Sergei

Recipes I keep coming back to — the ones I cook for people I actually want to feed.

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🇫🇷FranceAdvanced

Meat Dishes

Duck Confit (Confit de Canard)

Confit de canard is the defining dish of Gascony, the south-west corner of France where ducks are raised for foie gras and the region's most celebrated cooking technique is confit — from confire, to preserve. Duck legs are cured overnight in salt, pepper, thyme, and juniper, then submerged in duck fat and cooked at a barely trembling 100°C (210°F) for two and a half hours until the meat becomes impossibly tender and slides from the bone. The result is stored under its fat blanket in the refrigerator — the traditional method of preservation before refrigeration — where it continues to develop flavor over days or weeks. To serve, the legs are pulled from the fat and placed skin-side-down in a cold pan, then brought to high heat until the skin crackles and blisters to a dark, shattering gold. The interior stays fall-apart tender. The reserved duck fat is one of the finest cooking fats in the world — use it to fry potatoes.

1440 min620 kcal4 serves

🌾Gluten-free💪High protein

🇻🇳VietnamAdvanced

Soups

Pho Bo (Vietnamese Beef Noodle Soup)

Vietnam's most iconic dish — a crystal-clear, deeply aromatic beef broth simmered for hours with charred onion, ginger, and whole spices, served over rice noodles with paper-thin beef, fresh herbs, lime, and chili. The broth is everything.

210 min400 kcal4 serves

🌾Gluten-free🌶️Spicy💪High protein

🇯🇵JapanEasy

Soups

Miso Soup

The soul of Japanese daily cooking: a light umami-rich broth of dashi and miso with silken tofu, wakame seaweed, and scallion. Ready in 15 minutes with just 6 ingredients. The one rule: never boil miso — it kills the living enzymes and dulls the flavor.

15 min90 kcal2 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌾Gluten-free⚡Quick

🇮🇩IndonesiaAdvanced

Meat Dishes

Beef Rendang

Voted the world’s best food by CNN Travel readers in 2011 — slow-braised beef in a rich aromatic paste of coconut milk, garlic, ginger, galangal, lemongrass, and spices, cooked uncovered for hours until every drop of liquid evaporates and the meat is coated in a dark caramelized crust. A labor of love from West Sumatra that gets even better the next day.

150 min380 kcal5 serves

🌶️Spicy🌾Gluten-free💪High protein

🇰🇷KoreaMedium

Vegetable and Mushroom Dishes

Kimchi

Kimchi is a traditional Korean dish — fermented Peking cabbage with spicy spices and seasonings. Characterized by a bright tangy flavor with sour notes, crisp texture and intense aroma.

45 min50 kcal4 serves

🌶️Spicy💪High protein

Fresh from the kitchen · July 2026

Recipes cooked, shot, tested and published in the last two weeks.

Mapo Tofu (Sichuan Tofu in Chili Bean Sauce)

🇨🇳ChinaMedium

Vegetable and Mushroom Dishes

Mapo Tofu (Sichuan Tofu in Chili Bean Sauce)

Mapo tofu is the definitive Sichuan dish — cubes of silken tofu suspended in a glossy scarlet sauce of fermented chili bean paste and black beans, studded with crisp bits of pork and finished with freshly ground Sichuan peppercorn. The result is má là: the tingling numbness of the peppercorn against the burn of chili. Soft, fiery, and deeply savoury, it's built in minutes and eaten straight over steaming rice.

40 min380 kcal4 serves

🌶️Spicy💪High protein🌾Gluten-free

Chawanmushi with Crab and Shiitake (Japanese Steamed Egg Custard)

🇯🇵JapanMedium

Appetizers and Sandwiches

Chawanmushi with Crab and Shiitake (Japanese Steamed Egg Custard)

Chawanmushi is a savoury Japanese egg custard steamed until it barely sets — so soft it trembles on the spoon, with none of the firmness of a Western custard. Dashi carries the flavour, seasoned lightly with mirin and pale soy, while crab, shiitake, kamaboko, and ginkgo nuts sit hidden beneath the surface. Served warm in a lidded cup with a sprig of mitsuba and a shaving of yuzu, it's the quiet, restrained side of Japanese cooking.

40 min130 kcal4 serves

💪High protein

Banh Cuon (Vietnamese Steamed Rice Rolls)

🇻🇳VietnamAdvanced

Breakfast and Brunch

Banh Cuon (Vietnamese Steamed Rice Rolls)

Banh cuon are the silkiest thing in Vietnamese cooking — sheets of rice batter steamed paper-thin, so soft they're almost translucent, wrapped around minced pork and wood ear mushrooms. A northern Vietnamese breakfast staple, they're piled with fried shallots, fresh herbs, bean sprouts, and slices of cha lua, then dipped in nuoc cham, the sweet-sour-salty fish sauce dressing. The tapioca starch in the batter is what gives the wrappers their gentle chew.

75 min430 kcal4 serves

🌾Gluten-free

🇵🇭PhilippinesAdvanced

Meat Dishes

Sisig (Filipino Sizzling Pork)

Sisig is the Philippines' most famous sizzling dish — a bold, addictive tangle of crisp-edged chopped pork and chicken liver, brightened with calamansi, sharpened with raw onion and bird's eye chili, and served screaming hot on a cast-iron plate, often crowned with a raw egg stirred through at the table. Born in Pampanga as a way to use every part of the pig, it's sour, savoury, fatty, and spicy all at once — the ultimate pulutan to eat with cold beer and rice.

75 min560 kcal4 serves

💪High protein🌶️Spicy

🇲🇾MalaysiaMedium

Breakfast and Brunch

Nasi Lemak (Malaysian Coconut Rice)

Nasi lemak is Malaysia's national dish — fragrant coconut rice cooked with pandan, ringed by a spicy-sweet sambal, crisp fried anchovies, roasted peanuts, cucumber, and a boiled egg. Each element plays a role: creamy rice, fiery sambal, salty crunch, cooling cucumber. Traditionally wrapped in banana leaf and eaten for breakfast at roadside stalls, it's a whole plate of contrasts built around one bowl of rich, aromatic rice.

60 min620 kcal4 serves

🌶️Spicy💪High protein🌾Gluten-free

Hainanese Chicken Rice (Singapore-Style)

🇸🇬SingaporeAdvanced

Meat Dishes

Hainanese Chicken Rice (Singapore-Style)

Hainanese chicken rice is one of Singapore's national dishes, deceptively simple and quietly luxurious. A whole chicken is gently poached below a simmer until silky and just cooked, then plunged into ice for a jelly-set skin. The rice is fried in chicken fat with garlic and ginger and cooked in the poaching broth, so every grain is savoury and glossy. It's served with a trio of sauces — fiery chili-lime, ginger-scallion oil, and dark sweet soy — and a bowl of the clear broth.

80 min590 kcal4 serves

💪High protein🌶️Spicy

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