RecipeTin Eats food writer Nagi Maehashi on her new cookbook, Tonight

Chances are, if you look online for something to cook for dinner, RecipeTin Eats will pop up in your search results.

The website is the brainchild of Australian food blogger Nagi Maehashi. Founded in 2014, it now receives half a billion hits each year, and features over 1500 free recipes.

When Maehashi quit her job in corporate finance in 2014, she had no idea how popular it would become.

Now, her cookbooks regularly top best-seller lists and her latest -Tonight - has 150 new recipes to solve the problem of what's for dinner, using pantry staples to create quick, delicious meals.

Maehashi spoke to RNZ's Nights about her journey, who she's writing for, and where she gets her inspiration.

So where did the blog's name come from - and who does she write for?

Maehashi says she used to keep all her recipe cards in a tin, so when it came time to start the blog, it seemed like a good fit.

When writing recipes, she always has in her mind one of her closest friends, Rachel - a lawyer who has three teenage boys and a husband to feed.

"She's very capable in the kitchen. She's just time-poor. She works full time... so she's incredibly busy Monday to Friday. But on weekends she has a very large extended family, and she enjoys cooking. She loves good food. So sometimes she caters for large groups and sometimes she just likes to take her time in the kitchen."

Maehashi finds herself "talking" to Rachel as she writes.

" 'Rachel, gotta use dark soy for this one. I've told you 100 times before', but I know that she always forgets. And I have to convince her to use anchovies. 'I promise it doesn't taste fishy, but if you don't put it in there, you are going to complain to me that it doesn't taste that good!' "

Not everything in Maehashi's own kitchen makes it onto the blog, though.

"I do tend to do slightly more technical things on weekends. I do sushi, for example, but I don't have a single sushi recipe on my website.

"I choose not to go down the path of the $400 piece of equipment. I'm really focused on seeing how creative you can get and how exciting you can make a midweek meal using predominantly recipes from a regular grocery store. So it's very rare that a midweek meal would require a trip to an Asian store, for example."

Donovan asked if the blog was an instant success?

Maehashi says she left the corporate world knowing only that she had to do something for herself - and was "gobsmacked" to learn that people were making a living out of blogging.

She was considered a capable cook, but realised she needed to monetise that. One of the first challenges was learning how to take "nice pictures" of food, she says.

"I've never held a camera in my life - [I'm a] self-taught photographer, and I've taken all the photos from my cookbook, so that was one of the first things that I really worked very, very hard on."

The next step was learning about website layout then adding step-by-step instructions and finally, video recipes.

Some online recipes are criticised for having too much chit-chat and storytelling at the beginning, Nights host Emile Donovan points out.

It's a fine line, Maehashi says, and her early recipes did have more personal content.

These days, she is more likely to put that in her paid-for newsletter.

"The reality is, the majority of the people who come to my website are people who don't give a toss about me and whether I woke up with a headache. They just want the recipe. They just want to make dinner. So yeah, you've gotta make it efficient and give them just the information they need."

Some of Maehashi's instructions can be very specific - for example, about types of salt. Most chefs' recipes actually use sea salt flakes, she says, whereas hers use cooking salt.

The key was to add a little and taste as you go.

"Honestly, I consider it the single biggest reason for recipes that fail... because so many times people think a dish is bland, but it's just because they haven't had enough salt to bring out enough flavour in it. Or people over-salt things and they're inedible."

One of her "secret weapons" is an all-purpose Chinese stir-fry sauce she's dubbed Charlie. It contains a few pantry basics, and can be stored in the fridge for weeks before using with stir-fried noodles, vegetables and proteins.

"Basically the only ingredient you have to add to use it is water and it makes a sauce that's like the kind that you get from Chinese restaurants. So that clear, glossy, brown sauce."

So what's in Maehashi's weekly shopping trolley?

There is no such thing as a weekly shop in her household - she visits food stores "multiple times every day", and uses leftovers.

Her new cookbook, Tonight, includes one of her first-ever published recipes. At the time, she was on a "really tight" budget because she had no income, and was cooking economical meals.

"It's called my sticky pantry chicken because I literally always had the ingredients to it!"

Tonight (Pan Macmillan, $49.99) is out now in all good bookshops.

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.