Food. Travel. Photography. That’s the order they came in. These passions grew into preoccupations and, with sweat, curiosity and drive, have now become The Stranded Chef..
It's a journey through different countries and cultures bringing a new, bold and daring world of food to your kitchen. The Stranded Chef. A book designed to inspire the curious chef in us all. A life’s narrative of strange adventures in cooking portrayed in an unconventional cookbook of recipes, stories, culinary art and photography. With descriptive introductory paragraphs for each recipe, several short travel stories scattered throughout, artistic food and travel photography and childhood snap shots, The Stranded Chef can be enjoyed as coffee table read or a classic cookbook.
The details
Not your conventional cookbook, The Stranded Chef combines exciting narratives with images that tell stories of their own featuring 55 recipes in a book designed to inspire audacious dreams, be they physical, imagined or culinary. The pages of The Stranded Chef are a mosaic of full coloured photographs spanning 380 pages. Traditionally, cookbooks present their recipes in sections by course or ingredient. The Stranded Chef is a hard covered book that is sectioned into four regions/ with the stories and experiences that inspired the making of the recipes;
Lord Howe Island: Stranded in Paradise
Byron Bay Hinterland: from Bush to Beach
Asia: A life Spent Roaming
Mediterranean: Volkswagen Combi Vans to Super Yachts
The food
These recipes have been created on Lord Howe Island using fresh, organic and in-season produce, the freshest hand or line caught seafood and Australian bushfoods. It has been shaped and refined by what is available to me as The Stranded Chef.
I follow the principle of bringing out the best from the ingredients I have, which can be tricky when the fortnightly supply ship from the mainland is delayed!
When the pickings from the stores are low, there is always local herbs and subtropical fruits to purchase from local farmers and wild food to forage.
Each recipe has been inspired by a time and place of my journey through life, be it travel, growing up in the hills behind Byron Bay or living on the remote Lord Howe Island.
The making
This book has been in the making for many years, but has been a dream since childhood when I used to flick through my mother’s cookbooks marvelling at the beautiful pictures.
The food photography
I was four years old when my family packed up and travelled through Asia and Europe. My father took our photos with a Pentax film camera. I later followed in his footsteps and bought my first film camera in early high school. Although I have had a passion for photography since, I have had to learn the craft of food photography to show the intricate and delicate beauty of each dish. I was fortunate enough to have a friend shoot half of the food photographs while mentoring me along the way. His introduction to the techniques of food photography in combination with a lot of trial and error, I developed my own style and continued to shoot and cook the remainder of the book.
