Writer – Page 8 – 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.

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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© Dani Valent 2024