​The food I cook is shaped by the seasons and the harvests from our garden, so I can feed my family the most nourishing and local produce possible while also knowing it is fresh and organic. We go fishing occasionally in the summertime and sometimes eat the fish we have caught, but for now the recipes on this site are purely vegetarian, as that is where my expertise lies, and it is how we eat most of the time.  

My cooking style is to create healthy yet indulgent wholefood in a rustic seasonal manner. A typical meal at our house is a spread of bread or flatbreads, a main dish or small dishes of tapas style food all stemming from that days garden harvest, and finally a selection of condiments.

Because a lot of my recipes are influenced by ethnic cuisines you may need to invest in a few specialised ingredients to add to your pantry, such as pomegranate molasses, nigella seeds, or star anise, but once you have bought them you will find they last a long time, and it is these small pops of flavour that will bring your meals to the next level.

 

My maternal Grandmother was a beautiful cook, and even though she was a farmer's wife she always had a spread of exotic vegetarian food on offer, which was lucky for me because I discovered very early on that meat was not something I wanted to consume thank you very much! Whenever we visited, I would head straight to Granny’s kitchen, get the red stool out of the corner and ask her if she needed help. From a very young age she had me slicing vegetables, mixing cake batters, peeling garlic and chopping peanuts. I never bored of this time in the kitchen with her and gained so much knowledge which is inherent in me now.  

While Granny got me interested in the intricacies and practical knowledge of cooking, my mother passed on her insatiable passion for all things delicious and decadent from around the world, and she was always introducing us to wonderful and obscure meals and desserts. Mum also had many cookbooks I would pore over, one of the most influential being Mollie Katzen's classic vegetarian cookbook “The Enchanted Broccoli Forest.”​

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Over the years I have made cheese, tempered chocolate, tended to sourdough and ginger beer bugs, stretched beetroot and silver beet pasta through my mother's Italian pasta maker, and delved into making my own pickles, sauces and ferments. My latest joy is inventing probiotic drinks and juices, some of which I look forward to sharing on this site. I am always experimenting and finetuning my recipes and enjoy fusing foreign cuisines into my food, especially Middle Eastern, Indian, Mexican and Italian, so you will notice these influences within this blog.

 

Like gardening, cooking nutritious food from scratch is a talent humans have been finetuning since the discovery of fire. Therefore, I believe it is within all of us to be more experimental and adventurous with our cooking skills by putting a bit more trust into our intuition, and our taste buds. If we want to be more mindful of food we feed our families, this is vitally important. ​