Four Recipes Worth Cooking This Spring: Beef, Chicken, Salmon & Stew

Spring has this strange effect on the kitchen. You want to cook again — really cook — after months of heavy, forgettable food. The evenings are longer. The farmers market smells like dirt and possibility. And suddenly you’re standing in your kitchen at 6pm with actual energy.

These four recipes are what I come back to when that feeling hits. A properly seared beef fillet with a pan sauce that takes three minutes. A roast chicken that gets genuinely crispy. A glazed salmon that manages to be both weeknight-fast and impressive. And a slow meat stew for the weekend, when you have time to let something cook itself.

Each one has a technique worth understanding — not just following.

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Pan-Seared Beef with Red Wine Pan Sauce

The mistake most people make with a good beef fillet is crowding the pan. When that happens, the temperature drops, moisture steams off, and instead of a deep mahogany crust you get gray meat sitting in liquid. Not what you want.

Pat the steak dry — this is the step that matters most. Surface moisture is the enemy of the Maillard reaction, the browning process that builds the flavor crust. Same reason toast tastes better than bread. Dry surface, screaming hot pan, enough fat to conduct heat but not so much you’re shallow-frying.

Get a heavy pan (cast iron, carbon steel, or a thick stainless skillet) to a genuine high heat. Not medium-high. High. Add a neutral oil with a high smoke point — refined sunflower, grapeseed, or clarified butter — and wait until it shimmers and just starts to haze. Then the steak goes in and you don’t touch it for at least two minutes.

For the pan sauce: once the beef rests, pour off most of the fat and deglaze with a splash of red wine, scraping up all the browned bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. Those bits are called fond, and they’re essentially concentrated beef flavor. Let the wine reduce by half, add a ladleful of beef stock, reduce again, then swirl in 30g (2 tbsp) of cold butter off the heat. The fat in the butter emulsifies into the sauce, making it glossy and rich without being greasy.

Rest the beef for at least five minutes before cutting. The juices redistribute. It’s worth the wait.

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Roasted Chicken That Actually Gets Crispy

I spent years making roast chicken with pale, flabby skin and couldn’t figure out why. Turns out I was doing two things wrong: not drying the bird properly, and roasting at too low a temperature.

Chicken skin is full of moisture. For it to crisp, that moisture needs to escape before the skin can brown. The best method — embarrassingly simple once you know it — is to salt the chicken generously at least an hour before cooking, ideally the night before, and leave it uncovered in the fridge. The salt draws moisture out, then the moisture reabsorbs, seasoning the meat all the way through. The skin dries out in the open air.

Roast at 220°C (425°F). High heat renders the fat under the skin quickly and lets browning happen before the meat overcooks. Start breast-side up, check the thigh joint at 60-65 minutes for a 1.5kg (3.3 lb) bird — the juices should run clear when you pierce the thigh.

In spring, stuff the cavity with a halved lemon, a handful of fresh thyme, and a few spring onions. Nothing fancy. The aromatics perfume the meat from the inside as it cooks.

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Honey-Glazed Salmon with Spring Peas

Salmon is one of the most forgiving proteins in the kitchen, which is exactly why people overcook it. They think it needs more time and they’re almost always wrong. Overcooked salmon is dry, chalky, and sad. Properly cooked salmon is silky, barely opaque in the center, and pulls apart in clean flakes.

The glaze here is a three-ingredient thing: 2 tbsp honey, 1 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tsp rice vinegar. Whisk it together. That’s it. The honey caramelizes in the pan, the soy adds depth and salt, the vinegar keeps it from being cloying.

Cook the salmon skin-side down in a medium-high pan for about four minutes, then spoon the glaze over the top and flip for 60 seconds. The glaze catches and darkens quickly — watch it. If your fillet is thicker than 3cm (1.2 inches), give it another minute. The center should still have a slightly translucent look. It continues cooking off the heat.

Serve with quick-blanched spring peas and a squeeze of lemon. The sweetness of the peas against the savory glaze is one of those effortless spring combinations that doesn’t need improving.

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Slow-Cooked Meat Stew for the Weekend

A good stew is mostly patience. The technique is simple. The results are disproportionately good.

Start with 800g (1.75 lb) of beef chuck cut into 4cm (1.5 inch) cubes. Chuck has a lot of connective tissue — collagen — that breaks down into gelatin over long cooking. That gelatin is what gives a stew its body, the way it coats a spoon. It’s also why cheaper cuts make better braises than expensive ones.

Brown the beef in batches, never crowding the pot. I use a heavy Dutch oven for this, and I mean actually brown it — three minutes per side, a proper crust. Then the aromatics: onion, carrot, celery, garlic, cooked until soft. A tablespoon of tomato paste goes in and gets cooked for a couple of minutes until it turns brick-red and slightly sweet. Then flour — just a couple of tablespoons — stirred through to coat everything.

Deglaze with red wine, let it reduce, add beef stock to just cover the meat. A bay leaf, a few sprigs of thyme. Lid on, into a 160°C (320°F) oven for two to two-and-a-half hours.

The low oven temperature matters. Stovetop heat is concentrated at the bottom of the pot and causes the liquid to boil unevenly, which can make the meat tough even after long cooking. The oven surrounds the pot with gentle, even heat. The collagen converts slowly. Everything becomes tender without falling apart.

Check at the two-hour mark. The beef should yield easily when pressed with a spoon but still hold its shape.

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Try It Tonight

If you’ve got 20 minutes, start with the salmon. Dry the fillets, make the three-ingredient glaze, blanch some peas. By the time the rice or potatoes are done, dinner is on the table and it tastes like you thought about it.

If you’ve got a Sunday afternoon and the apartment smells like nothing interesting right now — start the stew. Brown the beef, build the base, get it in the oven, and go do something else for two hours. Come back to something worth eating.