Food Stories – Page 5 – Dani Valent
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I’ve been writing about food for almost 20 years now and I haven’t been sick of it for five minutes. Food is such a rich topic: it’s history, culture, family, sustenance, health, business, community, environment and even philosophy.

Food stories can be epic tales of migration, cool insights into technology, inspiring stories of persistence and discovery or simple insights into daily life. Food is a way of knitting together family and friends and can be shared via narrative, recipes, photos, video, audio, on the street or around a table. I love communicating about food in all these different ways: it’s rich, deep and endlessly fascinating and I learn something new with every story I write.

Dani Valent Cooking website launching June 9!

I’m so excited to announce the launch date for my new website is June 9 – woohoo! I can’t wait to share it with you. Dani Valent Cooking is a mixture of my dishes, including some from my In the Mix cookbooks, plus videos with some of my favourite Thermomix cooks and chefs. There’s homely stuff, cheffy stuff and everything in between.

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Jessi Singh

“Jessi loves to feed people and he can do it anywhere,” says his wife Jennifer. He did it as a boy in his Punjab village, getting up at 4am to water the fields, milk the buffalo and make yoghurt lassi for breakfast before heading to school. He did it in Jennifer’s miniature apartment in San Francisco. “He invited people over, I told him it was impossible, but amazing food kept appearing from my tiny kitchen,” she says. Even today, he’s known for rummaging in friends’ fridges and creating feasts, turning his hosts into honoured guests in their own homes. He’s tapping into a Sikh sense of hospitality. “It’s a natural part of my culture,” he says. “Everyone must sit down and eat together and the guest is considered God.” It also, simply, makes him feel good. “After a long day in the kitchen, cooking is a therapy for me,” he says. “It gives me huge satisfaction to know I made my meal from scratch.”

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Curtis Stone

“Steak’s up guys,” says Curtis Stone, slicing into a hunk of beef, appraising it keenly, chewing on a morsel with faraway eyes, then passing slivers around for feedback. He’s not at Maude, his feted Beverly Hills restaurant. He’s not at home in the Hollywood Hills, feeding his actor wife Lindsay Price and sons Hudson and Emerson. He’s not even filming for a television show – All-Star Academy (like The Voice, but with cooking) and Kitchen Inferno (a game show, like a speedy MasterChef with more fire balls) are two US series he’s hosted recently.

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Dishes that changed Melbourne

Firstly, I’m sorry I left your key dish out. The food that changed my life may not have rocked yours: we weren’t born in the same moment, my mum didn’t make the same stuff as your mum, and we didn’t seek out identical flavours or experiences. But because we eat in the same city, our culinary lineage overlaps and we are part of the same eating adventure. Here’s a subjective, incomplete list of threshold dishes that have pushed our food culture to tasty new places.

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Mister Jennings Creative Sessions

I’ve got a lot of respect for Melbourne chef Ryan Flaherty – he’s a contributor to my first cookbook, In the Mix: Great Thermomix Recipes (those cauliflower sausages are so delicate and delicious). We’ve co-hosted a cooking class together. I love eating his food in restaurants, especially now that he’s opened his own place, Mister Jennings. (See my review here.) He was also a Chef of the Year finalist for The Age Good Food Guide 2016.

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© Dani Valent 2024