Writer – Page 7 – Dani Valent
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I’m a journalist, restaurant critic, cookbook author, travel writer and screenwriter. I love telling stories!

My professional writing career started with travel publisher Lonely Planet. I was what they called a ‘parachutist’, which meant I’d go anywhere. That’s how I ended up writing about Bulgaria, Bonaire, Corsica, New York and Hong Kong.

One day my Lonely Planet boss said, “We need someone to go to Turkey to eat.” “That sounds like me,” I said. World Food Turkey was the result, a social, cultural and culinary investigation of Turkey which really turned me on to the rich possibilities of telling stories through food. Food is culture, history, family, life!

I’ve continued to thread food and travel through a writing career that’s included interviews with actors, politicians and even an astronaut. These days, I’m focusing on chefs, restaurants and cooking. My passion is connecting home cooks and eaters with great dishes and cuisines: if it’s tasty, I want to know about it, and I want you to know too.

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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Eva Orner

February 2005 and Eva Orner was doing it tough. She’d endured a long New York winter marked by blizzards and heavy snows, new in town, out of work, low on friends and short on cash. But one of her few buddies, someone she’d met back home in Melbourne, invited her to an Oscars party at his apartment in Tribeca. There, with Ground Zero out the window and A-list glamour on the TV, a dozen thirtysomethings sat on the floor with Indian takeaway on their laps and watched Jamie Foxx, Morgan Freeman, Hilary Swank and Cate Blanchett scoop the pool. “We all had to put in $50 for an Oscars sweep,” says Orner. “I was like, ‘My God, 50 bucks!’ ” But she won, and walked out with $600 to put towards the rent of her studio apartment eight blocks away. “I was so happy,” she says. “It was really handy.”

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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