Food Stories – Page 6 – 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.

Fridge Photo

This month, June 2013, is all about writing In the Mix 2 (or whatever we end up calling it), my second book of Thermomix recipes. The testing and re-testing (and re-re-testing) is almost done, the pics are done (gorgeous) and the fridge is not the 3D jigsaw puzzle of marvellous and mysterious ingredients that it was during last month’s photo shoot when I was cooking at least 10 dishes a day, many of them with seven or eight elements apiece. I loved the stacked up craziness of my photo shoot fridge (see pic) but I am really enjoying a sparser fridge right now – I can even see right to the back of it!

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Ruth Rogers profile. The Age

Kitchen royalty doesn’t come more august and influential nor, as it turns out, more down to earth than River Cafe co-founder Ruth Rogers. Rogers and the late Rose Gray opened their produce-driven Italian restaurant in London, on the northern bank of the Thames, in 1987. The motivation, at least partly, was to feed Ruth’s ‘‘starchitect’’ husband Richard Rogers, whose offices are next door. But Rogers and Gray always cooked with rigour and a sense of abundance and the River Cafe was never just a staff canteen. Its alumni include April Bloomfield, Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and, closer to home, Jesse Gerner, Tobie Puttock and many more. I nabbed ‘‘Ruthie’’ Rogers during the recent Melbourne Food and Wine Festival to ask her about her cooking musts and must-nots.

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Fat Duck Melbourne

It’s been the biggest story in Restaurant Land. Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant is three weeks in to a six-month season in Melbourne while the English original is being renovated. Bookings were allocated via a hysterically oversubscribed ballot. I didn’t score a table but was invited last-minute by a friend whose husband was unable to go. I do not wish sickness upon anyone but if it results in a Fat Duck meal for me then I’ll just have to send a get-well card and frock up.

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Recipe Club

Recipe club is go! We ate Turkish bread, pistachio duke and last year’s green olives from our tree. This year I’ve been part of a recipe club and I am loving it. Every two months, we meet at someone’s house for a bring-a-plate foodie fiesta. There are eight of us – plus or minus a couple each time, life being the busy, unwieldy beast that it is. Each night is themed: we’ve done Peruvian, Sicilian, Explosion, Curvy and last night was Turkish at my place. We eat, drink, talk and share recipes.

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Cook like Ottolenghi

He is the culinary equivalent of Beyonce. He’s an author, a TV host, and if you cook, you’ve tried one of his recipes. Yotam Ottolenghi is in his test kitchen, a series of low-tech spice-scented rooms under a railway arch in central London. I’m on the phone in Melbourne and this call is making me late for my kids’ school concert but I’ve decided that soaking up kitchen wisdom is as honourable a pathway to good motherhood as watching my girls twirl.

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Ben Shewry profile 2011

He survives on four hours sleep, forages in the wild for ingredients and even makes the cutlery himself. Dani Valent meets Ben Shewry, a very unusual superstar chef. I don’t know what I expected Ben Shewry to be doing when I walked into the Attica kitchen two hours before dinner service. Arranging foraged flowers with tweezers, perhaps. Creating “soil”. Dehydrating fruit at the very least. Instead, he is taking up a whole bench – half the small kitchen really – moulding clay to create 100 butter knives shaped like mini Maori clubs. Crafting cutlery by hand? Doesn’t Shewry make it hard enough for himself already?

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Kids in the kitchen. Fairfax, Good Food.

The prevailing narrative about children and food is that they’re eating too much, it’s the wrong food anyway and they’re eating it in front of brain-draining screens. They’re overweight, potentially diabetic and on track to number among the 65 per cent (and rising) of Australian adults who are too hefty to be healthy. But there’s a counterweight tale too, one of children who cook and eat healthy food, building good habits for their own lives and perhaps for their less aware elders. They are influenced by cooking shows on television, educational programs in schools, other family members and, sometimes, necessity.

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Lonely Planet

The news about Lonely Planet cutting its editorial operations in Melbourne hit me hard. Not because I work there, not even because I know people there, not anymore. But I worked at the Melbourne-based travel publisher from 1994 and more or less built a life around the company till my last travel writing job for them in 2003. Lonely Planet was fun and exciting. It trusted me with amazing travel and work opportunities, and it was while working for the company that I could first say the words I’d always wanted to: ‘I’m a writer.’

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