my darling lemon thyme

Tell us about the first thing you remember cooking as a kid.

One of my first cooking memories is making banana cake with my mum. We didn’t have a microwave when we were growing up, so the hard butter was always placed into a large stainless-steel bowl and then into a sink full of warm water to soften, making it easier to cream with the brown sugar. Mum always used wholemeal flour and adorned the cake with carob icing, sometimes spiked with fresh orange juice.

When did you realise cooking would become your profession?

I vividly remember, at about age ten, telling my best friend, Janna, that I wanted to be a chef. At the time she did too, and we’d spend every play-date cooking up all sorts of weird and wonderful things. At fourteen I got a job in our local dairy—which is what you might call a deli outside New Zealand, where all the pies were made in-house and baked fresh every day. I spent my days rolling ice-cream cones, serving customers and making sandwiches, but always dreamt of something more. A few years later, when a new cafe opened up in Raglan, NZ, only the second of its kind (it was the late ’90s, after all), I applied for a job as a kitchen hand, my first real taste of a professional kitchen. I started early in the morning with the chef, making muffins and cabinet food and doing the dishes. I worked Friday nights and weekends throughout my last few years of high school, and full-time over