A little bit of this, a little bit of RNZ
Some news we've been bursting to share: Mum (Laxmi) and I are featured in The RNZ Cookbook: A treasury of 180 recipes from New Zealand's best-known chefs and food writers.
Seeing our names in the same book as Dame Alison Holst, Al Brown, Nadia Lim, Peter Gordon, Julie Biuso and Lauraine Jacobs is something we still have to pinch ourselves about. Mum learned to cook Gujarati food in a Christchurch kitchen with no cookbooks at all, just memory, instinct and a lot of "a little bit of this, a little bit of that". Now her recipes sit on the shelf alongside the people who taught New Zealand how to cook.
About The RNZ Cookbook
Edited by David Cohen and Kathy Paterson and published by Massey University Press, The RNZ Cookbook gathers 180 of the best recipes shared on RNZ over the years. The editors whittled them down from around 3,000 recipes on the RNZ website, and every one has been tested and endorsed by the cook who shared it.
What we love most is how it's put together. The book follows a day of RNZ National programming, from Morning Report through Nine to Noon, Afternoons and Nights to the weekend shows, taking you from breakfast right through to dessert. Jesse Mulligan wrote the foreword, and the book went on to win Best Cookbook at the 2023 PANZ Book Design Awards.
"If cooking is one of humankind's great joys, then The RNZ Cookbook is a joy indeed." - David Herkt, New Zealand Herald
How our recipes found their way to RNZ
In 2018 Mum and I joined Nine to Noon to talk about our cookbook, A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That, and to share two family favourites: a Gujarati fish curry and roti.
We were also lucky enough to join Jesse Mulligan on Afternoons, talking about Mum's cooking and the stories behind our family recipes. In 2021 we spoke about Fried Masala Chicken. Jesse went on to write the foreword for The RNZ Cookbook, so it feels fitting to find ourselves inside its pages.
Mum came to Christchurch from Gujarat in the 1960s. She learned to feed a husband and an extended family by watching and tasting, never from a written recipe. Decades later I talked her into writing it all down, and we spent eight months cooking side by side, measuring every pinch she'd always done by eye. What began as a record for our family became a book for anyone who grew up with Gujarati food, married into it, or simply wants to learn.
That's why this feels so special. Gujarati home cooking has been part of New Zealand's kitchens for generations, and it's a joy to see it recognised in a book that celebrates the country's food story. Most of all, it's Mum's moment. The woman who arrived without a single cookbook is now in one of the country's favourites.
Get your copy
The RNZ Cookbook (Massey University Press, hardback, 272 pages) is available from Massey University Press and good bookshops across Aotearoa. It makes a lovely gift for anyone who cooks along with the radio.
And if our recipes in there leave you wanting more, the whole family collection is waiting in A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That.
Thank you to RNZ, David Cohen and Kathy Paterson for including us, and to everyone who has cooked from our book over the years. Mum says: a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a lot of love.