Win fabulous cookbooks & prizes

It’s birthday month! It’s hard to believe that we launched the new-look Shared Kitchen one year ago in August. A birthday needs celebrating, and that’s what we will do this month with a horde of fabulous giveaways up for grabs when you renew or take out an annual subscription. 

I have chosen four exceptional cookbooks to add to the prize pool. These books are all by New Zealand authors. Three of them, Robert Oliver, Nici Wickes and Angela Redfern (owner of Ripe Deli), have been turning out impressive and worthy books for several years as part of their multi-faceted careers. While it may be the first time Christall Lowe has put her name to a cookbook, she’s been photographing food for commercial clients and other cooks for some time. Her book kai, a hardback, sumptuous book over 300 pages long, won the Judith Binney Prize for illustrated non-fiction in the 2023Ockham NZ Book Awards. What fabulous books. Read more below.Renew your annual subscription to Shared Kitchen, gift a subscription to someone you nominate, or take out a new subscription for yourself and be in to win these books, along with other great prizes.

Win Timmy Smith Tea Package RRP $70.00

4 x 250ml Pause for Tea cans of sparkling sugar-free tea / 4 x 10g packs of specialty tea / 1 x stainless steel tea strainer

Win Rum and Que Packages (2, approximately RRP $85.00 each)

Rum and Que (1) RRP $85.95

1 x Fat separator jug / 1 x Rum and Que Spice Rub

Rum and Que (2) RRP $85.90

1 x PureQ Solo meat probe thermometer / 1 x Rum and Que Spice Rub

Win Cookbooks

More from a Quiet Kitchen by Nici Wickes

Published by Bateman Books RRP $49.99

Nici’s book showcases the best of home cooking — pies and tarts and comforting soups, cheesy gratins, crunchy fritters, and bowls of salty, sweet, sticky, saucy, spicy goodness, with lots of vegetables, nuts and seeds — the sorts of things you’d love for lunch, and for dinner, and breakfast, too. Most recipes are for one, though some make enough for two. Cakes generally feed more. Nici relishes cooking for one because she says you can easily make dishes that are a bother to make in bulk like golden crunchy schnitzel, a perfect pork chop, a whole baby lamb rack, and cute little puddings and tarts just for one (no sharing!). 

Although the book celebrates the solo cook, recipes can me bulked up and ideas used as a springboard for your own imagination. 

Threaded throughout are Nici’s honest accounts of living a solitary life. She shares the fun and the highs along with a dose of reality — the loneliness and hardships she encounters living on her own. She’s refreshingly honest, and after navigating her way through the pandemic, a flooded house in 2023 and a bout of Covid, she has come to find joy in daily rituals and small things such as swimming in the ocean year-round, growing her own food and taking long walks. When loneliness seeps in, she cooks.

‘Mostly I cook my way through troubled days because an ingredient, an aroma, a flavour, the sounds of cooking — the clatter of cockles, the sizzle of bacon, the blipblop of something simmering — seem to effortlessly ground me, bringing me back into connection again.’

Kai by Christall Lowe

Published by Bateman Books RRP $59.99

As I mentioned above, Christall Lowe has been photographing food for commercial clients and other cooks for some time, and, as you would expect, she has taken the food photographs for her own book. She credits friend and photographer Helen Lea Wall for the lifestyle photos — and there are lots of these scattered throughout the book, giving it a strong visual presence. Designer Katrina Duncan must have taken a deep breath when she saw the hundreds of images. Still, she has pulled it all together with a clean design incorporating black and white and colour images, close-ups of finished dishes, action shots, foraging shots, photos of produce, and photos of the sea, lakes, bush and forest.

Recipe introductions are detailed and cover chit-chat, family secrets, tips, and suggested accompaniments. The chapters have lengthy introductions, too, so there is plenty to read as you go through the book. One word sums it up: generosity (there is plenty of everything), and I mean that positively.

Christall is of mixed Māori and Chinese heritage, which gives the recipe collection an edge: Horopito Roast Lamb with Orange & Mint Sauce or Koro Chee Sticky Pork? They both look delicious. If you have a sweet tooth, you will be well rewarded — there are three sweet chapters: Cold Desserts, Warm Puddings and Baking & Sweet Treats, as well as treats to be found in the bread and baking chapters.

Kai is a sumptuous, hard-covered 300-page book with over 100 recipes.  It won the Judith Binney Prize for illustrated non-fiction in the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards.

Ripe Recipes Thought for Food by Angela Redfern

Published by Beatnik Publishing RRP $60.00

Anyone who has visited Angela Redfern’s Ripe Delis will know how hard it is to choose what to buy; everything looks so fresh, tempting, tasty and succulent. Just when you think you have made up your mind, a chef walks by with a tray of gorgeousness that turns heads, and confusion reigns again. 

Thought for Food is the fourth book in the Ripe series, published in 2022, and I include it here in case it, and the other books, have slipped under your radar. You need to get these books and get cooking the recipes!

The Ripe ethos is sustainability, and the book is full of useful tips on choosing, storing and using up food. There are well over 100 recipes with heaps of fresh and inspiring salads — something they are famous for — and tempting baking. I could happily cook and eat my way through all the recipes.

Eat Pacific — The Pacific Island Food Revolution Cookbook by Robert Oliver

Published by Massey University Press RRP $60.00

Robert Oliver is one cool dude. New Zealand-born but raised in Fiji and Samoa, he effortlessly straddles the roles of chef, author, television presenter and food and health ambassador for the Pacific. His 2009 ground-breaking book Mea’ai Kai took the top gong at the World Cookbook Awards in 2010. That book and his second publication, Mea’ai Samoa, published in 2014, was made into the television series Real Pasifik.

Robert is also the founder and host of Pacific Island Food Revolution, a television social-led movement designed to revive the South Pacific’s traditional cuisines and food systems. It has an estimated five million viewers a week (from a total population of 12 million).

Robert has been on a mission to improve the health of island nations, and by taking his Pacific Islands Food Revolutionstraight into the sitting rooms of families and cooks, he is doing just that. 

Robert says, ‘Pacific Island Food Revolution shows us what we’ve known all along: that the answer to our regional health crisis is quite literally in our own backyard ­— our local food.’ Robert was awarded a New Zealand Order of Merit in 2022.

While this book is an important social work, it’s a cookbook, too, and joyously celebrates the food of the Pacific. There is an excellent Pacific foods glossary, and substitutions are given.