Here's one I prepared earlier...

Almost famous! Well, for a few days anyway. I talked to Kathryn Ryan about The Colour of Food last week, and you can listen to it here - with recipes, including one from Albania.

Then on Thursday we had a launch for the print edition at Unity Books. For the first time in my life, I had a queue for book signing.

This coming Wednesday morning I'll be cooking and talking about my book (at the same time!!) on TVOne's Good Morning, at 9 am.

I've been told I have precisely seven minutes, which of course isn't enough time to finish cooking hardly anything. So at the end I'll get to do something I've always wanted to do - whip out the completed dish and say, "Here's one I prepared earlier!"

For more on my food memoir - see the Listener

Thanks, Lucy, for your Meetup message to Wellington food bloggers about me being in the Listener. The lead feature is about e-book publishing and it starts with a look at my food memoir, which Awa Press is bringing out as its first original e-book next March.




The cute photo they used of me aged four was hand-coloured by my mother - she would have been thrilled to see it in a magazine.

Not what I meant to write

Last Thursday I thought this was going to be an exceptionally cheerful post with highlights of the food bloggers' conference, held last Friday and Saturday at the new Cordon Bleu school in Wellington. I had been looking forward to it for ages, so when I woke up on Friday with a really nasty cold I just gulped down the cold pills and soldiered on, determined to enjoy myself. Which wasn't hard, because it was splendid from start to finish.

          However, I will have to be excused this week, because I got a phone call today to tell me that my birth mother died very peacefully this morning (see Elsewoman). Soon I'll be heading off for the funeral. In past times she would have relished hearing all about it and seeing my photos. So I will tell you my stories about it next week instead, imagining I'm telling her too. But just not right now.

           What I will tell you briefly, though, is what I was able to tell my mostly sister and one or two brother bloggers at the dinner on Friday night. The food memoir I've been writing for three years is going to be published early next year by Awa Press as their first "e-riginal" - an original e-book. Here's what I said on Friday, with a first tiny taste of the book itself. It's a little memorial for my birth mother too - she loved eating and cooking, and one of our greatest pleasures was eating out together.

"I love reading food memoirs, and I’ve loved writing this one. I’ve set out to conjure up a lifetime of experiences related to food. So it covers a lot of ground. It moves from the everyday fare of suburban Mount Eden in the 1950s to the pitfalls and pleasures of learning to cook as a 19 year old bride who had never lifted a pan in my life; on to discovering the exotic dishes of Albania in the 1970s, and at last getting to grips with French food in all its glory.

But of course, food never stands alone. From the beginning, it’s tied up with our deepest feelings and desires. So for me, writing about food has also meant writing about finding a long-lost mother, losing a son, sharing the kitchen and table with a beloved husband - and finally, over the last eighteen months, learning for the first time how to cook and eat alone.

I want be in touch with you all again in the next few months about my book...But for now, to go with this great dinner, here’s a tiny advance taste.       

Auckland, 1958. At first it was the French words for food that I loved, even when I had to invent my own explanation of what they meant. Our French textbook En Route said that at 10 o’clock every morning, French school children ate pain au chocolat. Bread with chocolate.

           I’d never had any French bread, but I knew what it looked like from the pictures. I imagined a thin dark-haired girl like Lesley Caron in Gigi, opening a paper bag and taking out a piece of baguette and a few squares of dark chocolate. (Somehow I always thought of it as dark like Cadbury’s Energy, not pale brown like Dairy Milk).

              But I wasn’t sure what happened next – did she eat these things one at a time, in alternating bites, or did she put the chocolate into the bread and eat it like a chocolate sandwich?

                It took me seventeen years to find out. On my first morning in Paris, I ate my first warm, flaky, buttery, melting pain au chocolat, and knew that this was what those schoolgirls in En Route had been eating all along."

Crunch time

Mystery of the Week: Watching the hype about New Zealand apples finally breaking into the Australian market, and setting aside the fact that a week later, some bright spark left a piece of leaf and a (reportedly dead) insect in a box of them, resulting in a new partial ban, I couldn't help wondering - where did the glossy, crunchy Rose apples shown in the news items come from?
        We saw one happy Australian after another biting into these lovely apples which were absolutely nothing like the somewhat soggy, distinctly UN-crunchy Rose apples currently on sale in the shops here. Is it the usual story - all the good stuff goes overseas, leaving locals stuck with the leftovers? And if you go to Oz and try to bring one back, you'll be hit with a $200 fine, so don't even think about it...

News of the Week: Not much cooking going on, because (a) Julio's gone (this sounds like that lovely old Harry Belafonte ballad, "Delia's gone..."), (b) I've got plenty of delicious little scraps in the freezer to eat up, and (c) I'm working very hard on my food memoir, because I want to have it all finished by November at the latest, so it's crunch time. But do not despair..

Promise of the Week: NEXT week I'll report on my first attempt to make one of the recipes in Alexa Johnston's new book, What's for Pudding? On Tuesday I went to hear her talk about it at the wonderful Marsden Books, and it was a delightful experience - almost as good as actually eating pudding - so watch this space...