Well, Happy Easter! I trust you and yours are loaded up with chocolate eggs, elegant rabbits (white chocolate, naturally) and all manner of other chocolatey goodness. I also trust that no-one you love was foolish enough to give you a carob bilby without any justifiable reason other than that was all they had left in the local newsagents on Easter Sunday morning.

Speaking from personal experience, this can result in quite an unpleasant scene.  

And talking of unpleasant scenes, this week’s column was supposed to be a brilliant insight into delicious uses for leftover chocolate; it was going to be a cracker. There’s only one problem: “leftover chocolate” is not a thing in my world. 

“Unopened chocolate” and “chocolate I’m just about to eat”? These exist. But “leftover chocolate” is so unlikely it is almost a culinary oxymoron to rival “plastic silverware”, “jumbo shrimp” and “humane slaughter”.

So, I turned to the oracle at delicious. to ask what’s dominating internet food searches at the moment in a desperate attempt to fill this page, and he’s come up trumps. 

Two new trends are thronging the ether demanding attention, and getting it – the arrival of “dump dinners” and the return of “creamy” as a desirable adjective when it comes to food. 

“Creamy” is why you’ll have seen a burrata decadently lounging on my zucchini pesto pasta on the cover of the last issue of the magazine, and it’s also why dishes like creamy chicken pasta, creamy garlic prawns and chicken Normandy are all going off like a frog in a sock.  

If your mouth is watering and you are thinking of the imperative need for a creamy mushroom or green peppercorn sauce for your steak, you too are in the thrall of “creamy”.

As if to make a point, mornays, those rich, cream sauces – usually for seafood – have also made a surprise return on the back of this creamy trend. Searches for mornay sauce recipes are up a massive 450 per cent from this time last year, with Adelaideans leading the charge for mornays in a world where people are searching for everything from salmon or seafood mornay to keto tuna mornay. Well, apart from lobster mornay. Needless to say, Melburnians were the most likely to be searching for that particularly luxe version. 

It’s hard to know where this creamy/mornay phenomenon has come from. Certainly not hip restaurants, which still seem more enamoured with woodfired grills, pickles and citrus than old-school sauces finished with enough dairy to float a Jersey cow. 

Maybe it is France finally regaining culinary leadership over Italy, Spain or Scandinavia (which is unsupported by any other evidence, so highly unlikely), or even our COVID-led re-embracing of carbs and bread that came hand-in-hand with a resurgence of cream sauces and bechamels in the home kitchen. Or maybe it’s just because white rice was really perfectly made for mopping up the creamy, garlicky juices from those prawns.

If I was a betting man, I’d say it’s part of the return of retro dishes from an era that prized that lustrous mouth-feel. And in these times of strife, a little luxury and reassurance from stirring a spoon of cream into a gravy to make it a sauce may be just what we need to make us feel safe again. 

The other trending search is the rather less appealing “dump dinners”. In the US it would seem that the labour-saving convenience of the slow cooker is not enough. The latest craze is one-pot dishes where you dump everything in – meat, veg, pasta… everything – and let it cook away, whether it’s a Tuscan white bean soup, braise of red wine and tomatoes, or slow-cooked honey teriyaki chicken. 

There’s even a creamy chicken cashew curry dump dinner and another of creamy Tuscan chicken and pasta bake, where the pasta cooks in the sauce, ensuring that its starch will make the sauce extra creamy – or claggy depending on your POV. That last one is obviously a search double whammy.

Personally, when it comes to these dump dinners I’m not a fan. There’s a danger with this style of cooking that it can be a little gluggy, and with no browning of the meat, caramelising of your onions, deglazing of the pan or reducing your  wine, you risk not getting the depth of flavour that these few short processes can add. That may be the Luddite in me talking, but it’s a Luddite who has learnt that there’s a big difference between a machine-stirred, hot, wet rice and a creamy mushroom risotto where the butter and parmesan has been lovingly and enthusiastically turned in by hand; and between that slow-cooker bolognese that never tastes quite as good as the one where you’ve taken the little effort to do those few extra steps. 

On the upside, dump dinners are a truly set-and-forget meal. And is there really that much difference from when our peasant forebears threw some bones in the cauldron with vegies and water, and left it cooking all day over a slow fire so they had something warm to eat at the end of the day?