It’s 5.30pm. Someone’s hungry, someone’s homework isn’t done, and the question that haunts every parent reverberates down hallways everywhere: what’s for dinner?
Leah Itsines has built a career on answering it without resorting to two-minute noodles or a four-hour braise.
The Adelaide-raised cook – co-founder of the BARE nutrition guides, bestselling author, and more recently a mum herself – has just released her latest cookbook, ‘Healthy Meals for Busy People’. As the title promises, it’s aimed squarely at people with no spare hours and no intention of giving up good food. She’s blunt about why: she’s not, in her words, “slaving away cooking a four-course meal for six hours” – she’s busy, like the rest of us. The 100-plus recipes inside are built around exactly that reality.
What sets it apart is how it’s organised – less a collection of pretty dishes than a system for surviving the week. There are express dinners on the table in 20 minutes or less, one-pot mains that save on washing up, and a clever ‘one meal into many’ approach where a single base recipe riffs four ways across the week, so dinner never feels like leftovers. For the organised (or the optimistic), there are make-ahead meals to prep on a quiet Sunday and batch-cooking ideas for when there’s a little more time up your sleeve.
Becoming a parent changed the way Itsines cooks, steering her recipes towards the quick, the family-friendly and the doable on a weeknight. It shows. This is food designed to keep a household fed, healthy and on budget without anyone needing a degree in meal prep, shot through with the kind of fresh, modern photography that makes you want to actually cook from it rather than just admire it.
With more than 800,000 followers and a loyal audience for her nutrition apps, Itsines knows her crowd… and a recent turn as San Remo’s brand ambassador suggests the rest of the country has caught on too.
For parents who’d like to eat well but ran out of time to think about it somewhere around the second school drop-off, it’s a handy thing to have on the shelf – or, more likely, open on the bench with something simmering beside it.
Healthy Meals for Busy People by Leah Itsines is published by Murdoch Books. RRP $39.99
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