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.

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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 Japan25 recipes found India18 recipes found Mexico18 recipes found China15 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.

Moqueca Baiana (Brazilian Fish and Shrimp Stew)

🇧🇷BrazilMedium

Fish and Seafood Dishes

Moqueca Baiana (Brazilian Fish and Shrimp Stew)

Moqueca Baiana is Bahia's iconic seafood stew — firm white fish and shrimp simmered gently in coconut milk with tomatoes, peppers, onion, and lime, finished with dendê, the red palm oil that gives the dish its glowing orange colour and nutty, faintly smoky depth. Born from Indigenous, African, and Portuguese roots, it's layered rather than stirred and cooked low so the fish stays whole. Served over white rice, it's the soul of Brazilian coastal cooking.

60 min430 kcal4 serves

💪High protein🌾Gluten-free

Mole Poblano (Mexican Chicken in Chocolate Chili Sauce)

🇲🇽MexicoAdvanced

Meat Dishes

Mole Poblano (Mexican Chicken in Chocolate Chili Sauce)

Mole poblano is Mexico's most celebrated sauce — a deep, dark, layered blend of dried chiles, toasted nuts and seeds, dried fruit, spices, and a little Mexican chocolate, ladled over tender chicken. Born in the convents of Puebla, it's famously complex, with well over a dozen ingredients ground and simmered into a glossy, bittersweet-spicy sauce. It doesn't taste of chocolate; the cacao just deepens the whole into something rich and unforgettable.

150 min560 kcal6 serves

💪High protein🌶️Spicy

Ají de Gallina (Peruvian Creamy Chicken)

🇵🇪PeruMedium

Meat Dishes

Ají de Gallina (Peruvian Creamy Chicken)

Ají de gallina is one of Peru's most cherished comfort dishes — shredded poached chicken folded into a velvety golden sauce built on ají amarillo, the fruity yellow chili at the heart of Peruvian cooking. Milk-soaked bread and ground walnuts thicken it, while parmesan adds a salty, umami edge. Mildly spicy and rich, it's spooned over rice with boiled yellow potatoes, olives, and hard-boiled egg — a fusion of Spanish and Andean roots.

60 min480 kcal4 serves

💪High protein🌶️Spicy

Tvorozhnaya Zapekanka (Russian Cottage Cheese Bake)

🇷🇺RussiaAdvanced

Sweet Dishes

Tvorozhnaya Zapekanka (Russian Cottage Cheese Bake)

Tvorozhnaya zapekanka is the soft, lightly sweet cottage-cheese bake that Russians remember from childhood kitchens and kindergartens. Sieved tvorog is mixed with eggs, sugar, and semolina, studded with raisins, and baked until set with a golden top. It slices like a cross between a cheesecake and a soufflé and is just as good cold as warm, with sour cream or condensed milk.

80 min240 kcal6 serves

🌿Vegetarian💪High protein

🇷🇺RussiaEasy

Beverages

Kissel (Russian Berry Kissel)

Kissel is a classic Russian berry dessert-drink thickened with potato starch. Tart cranberries and red currants are simmered into a bright ruby juice, sweetened, then set to a glossy, spoonable consistency with a starch slurry. How much starch you add decides whether it's a warm sippable drink or a firm dessert you eat with a spoon. It's naturally vegan and gluten-free.

25 min120 kcal6 serves

🌱Vegan🌾Gluten-free⚡Quick

🇷🇺RussiaMedium

Sweet Dishes

Halva (Russian Sunflower Halva)

Sunflower halva is the crumbly, fibrous sweet that Soviet and Russian childhoods were built on — instantly recognizable by its toasted-seed aroma and the way it flakes into soft layers. Roasted sunflower seeds are ground to an oily paste, bound with a hot sugar syrup, and worked until the mass turns fibrous rather than smooth. Unlike Middle Eastern tahini halva, the star here is the sunflower seed, giving a deeper, nuttier flavor.

60 min520 kcal10 serves

🌱Vegan

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