Hi, I’m Melanie and I’m a gardener who loves to cook, and a cook who loves to garden.  I have no formal training in either but have fed my family out of the garden for years, and have cooked in restaurants, cafes and done wedding and function catering.

Nowadays with all the children grown up and gone, I have more time to learn and explore, and there is so much to learn!  I have always grown organically but now I’m learning about permaculture and regenerative gardening practices, about growing healthy nutrient dense food with high brix readings and about managing pests and diseases by making the plants stronger and inviting in more beneficial insects.  And the veges are booming, I’m growing so much food we have to literally make the veges in the garden the main thing we eat or we wouldn’t get through it all. We live in Golden Bay, the top northwestern corner of the South Island of New Zealand. We have a temperate climate, have a good rainfall, get frosts in winter but it rarely drops below zero and we can grow all year round.

So this leads me to the cooking part. I’m not cooking all these veges as sides for something else, they have had to become the stars of the show, of course with support from various proteins and carbs, but they are the main component of most of what we eat. To keep it interesting I am searching out vege-centric recipes from all over the place – old books, the internet, my mums old clearfile full of cuttings, different cuisines from all over the world, my old clippings from pre internet days, magazines. I cook and adapt these recipes to suit what I have because I only go shopping once a fortnight and never go out to buy something I need, but I do keep a well-stocked pantry. I always credit the original source unless its something I clipped out years ago and have lost the original, or a dish that’s so well known (lasagne for example) I can’t really say where I got it from.

Which brings me to this blog…why am I doing it and who is the audience? I’m still puzzling about both of those questions.  Being a naturally private person and an introvert, the public exposure it entails most often makes me cringe and want to fall down a hole, and yet I still feel the need to share.  I think in this age of supermarket and convenience food it’s important to me to keep a record of my garden through the seasons and how much, and how deliciously, we do eat out of it. And it keeps it interesting for me. Keeps me searching, learning more and more, and always finding something new to cook or grow and share with what’s in season. Its still early days, and I had a two-year break, but I’d like to think this blog could become a rich resource for vegetable cookery, seasonal produce and garden to table eating. I’m struggling to coming to terms with making Instagram posts as there seems to be more likes and clicks there than on facebook these days, yet I have yet to make an insta post that doesn’t make me want to hide under a bush, it makes me feel so embarrassed so there aren’t many yet. But if I don’t share what is the point of even doing it all? I don’t even know who is reading it as I hardly ever get any comments or likes but love it when I do so feel free to make comments. I have a stats page in the admin that shows there are people looking, whoever they are, and sometimes from all over the world.

I’m not doing it for money, there are no ads or affiliate links. I don’t have a team, its just me taking photos on my phone of the day’s food I cooked. I do my best to make the photos look good, but I have no lighting or fancy props and as winter approaches I have to take photos under artificial light when its dark outside, so they don’t look as good.

Weirdly I’m a bit of a tech nerd too. I once wrote a whole website by learning code.  I enjoy the whole process of editing and making posts and pages.

In the end, I guess I’m doing it because I love gardening and love cooking, I’m passionate about eating fresh, seasonal and unprocessed food that tastes the way it’s meant to taste, I’m excited about finding new things to make and I want to share all that with people.

Welcome to my blog and I hope you enjoy it!

Published Cookbooks