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When my sister and I were at school our lunchboxes never contained any food that wasn’t homemade, aside from the occasional little packet of raisins. Did I know how lucky I was? No, I didn’t. When you are a kid, the need to feel you fit in is paramount – let nothing differentiate you from the tribe. Putting together some lunchbox ideas for Taste magazine recently got me thinking about ways to liven up this important meal of the day... 

Luckily for my husband Ted and I, both of our kids have grown up enjoying cooking. As with many kids, their interest in cooking started with baking. In the transformation of simple ingredients, such as butter, sugar, eggs and flour, into sweet, tender cakes, biscuits, pies and desserts there is not just that magical sense of alchemy, but generally a very delicious spoon from the mixing bowl to lick...

So many people around the globe live in war-torn societies and on a daily basis have to cope with bombings and loss and fear. But if you have never encountered war face-to-face it’s not an easy idea to get your head around. The sheer awful terror of war was driven home to me on a school trip with my daughter when she was about 11. It was at this time of year, coming up to Anzac Day...

With the school holidays upon us again we've got an exciting competition to help encourage kids into the kitchen. Cook something with your kids during the holidays, upload a photo and the recipe to my website and you'll be in to win a gorgeous Cookie Inventor Kit worth $45, courtesy of the clever Kiwi company Seedling. It's a fun and easy school holiday project that involves two things all kids love – food and computers.

Throughout my childhood my mother’s lasagne was a dish I could never get enough of. It went on to be one of my kids’ favourite meals and last year when our daughter Rose was on a gap year and living with a family in Sweden, she skyped home for the recipe to cook for the family’s Sunday supper. The brownie points she scored were right up there and to this day they still email her saying, “Come back – we want more lasagne!”

If I think back over the years, some of the most fun times I’ve ever had have been at Easter.

Maybe it’s because here in New Zealand everyone is primed for the last big holiday before winter, ready for an adventure or an expedition, and definitely ready to be sociable. I know I am.

If you want to enjoy fresh vegetables over the winter, now is the time to get busy in the garden. It's hard to believe, when the full flush of autumn harvests is coming to bear as it has been in my Wanaka garden, that soon things will stop growing. But if I don’t get on with it now, I’ll find it’s all too late and my plants won’t come to ripeness before the shortest day.

I suspect I’m not the only woman – or man – who has an emotional relationship with chocolate. When I was living in New York in the Eighties I had this dishy boyfriend who used to pick me up in a limo and take me out to nice restaurants. Then I went up to Toronto to work for a while, and one night I rang my nice boy in New York. A woman answered the phone... 

I would never have picked my husband as a romantic when I first met him. But shortly after we were married I was going through some drawers when I pulled out an old Valentine’s card, still in its envelope.

I always feel incredibly feral when I get back to work after the summer break. Weeks with no mirror, no hairdresser, no makeup, no smart clothes... a daily routine of easy, lazy meals, nothing fancy or complicated. And that’s as it should be, for the best thing about summer is that whole wonderful sense of freedom.

My mother was a brilliant cook and a fabulous baker. She was always in the kitchen whipping up treats to fill the stash of cake and biscuit tins that lined the pantry.

There’s something about the fresh summer air that gets the appetite going. Whether I’m swimming, gardening or off on an adventure, being outdoors always makes me hungry.

One of the best things about the summer holidays is the sheer simplicity of life. For a few days or weeks, home is a rumpty old bach or a campsite or caravan somewhere by the sea, a river or a lake.

One of the most memorable New Year’s parties I’ve ever attended was held in the 1980s at an old woolshed in the country outside of Gisborne. As the clock turned to midnight a flaming hay bale was dispatched on a flying fox. It whizzed down the wire in a flaming fireball, into an old car sitting a couple of paddocks away. 

As much as I love Christmas Day, it’s Boxing Day that I really look forward to. It always seems that you have to get through Christmas before the holiday actually starts.

Today's recipe is quite simply ambrosia – Raspberry Ripple Ambrosia, to be exact!

The best thing about Christmas Day is the fact that, after a morning spent preparing the big midday meal, you've got carte blanche to curl up on the sofa for a little afternoon nap while the teens do the dishes.

If there's one day of the year when a little indulgence is practically compulsory, it's Christmas Day. And dessert doesn't get much more decadent than my Chocolate Sponge Roll with Figs. 

Three hundred and sixty four days of the year I believe in keeping things simple. A plain tablecloth, a candle or two and a jug of water are all it takes to set the scene for dinner.

When I'm serving a showstopping main dish like Roast Turkey with Cider Gravy or Spicy Barbecued Beef I like to keep the side dishes simple. A Trio of Vegetables featuring crispy roast potatoes and a couple of green vegetables should do the trick.

One of the great things about celebrating a summertime Christmas is the plethora of fresh seasonal vegetables and fruits that abound at this time of year. I love to serve at least one big salad with Christmas dinner, and this year I'm mixing it up a bit with my Pawpaw Spinach Salad.

As the year hurtles towards another rollover, there’s always so much to do. I guess this is partly because here in the antipodes we don’t just take a Christmas break, but run our whole summer holiday off the end.

I used to think I was destined for a life of dry and tough turkey – until I discovered the secret powers of brining. Now I brine my turkey overnight before cooking it I've revealed a whole new world of juicy, flavoursome Christmas dinners.

For some people, the stuffing is the highlight of any chicken or turkey roast. Others can take it or leave it. But if there's one day of the year when you pull out all the stops and make your own savoury stuffing, make it Christmas Day.

It was the jam that did it - my fabulous Ten-Minute Raspberry Jam that I was making with the haul of fresh raspberries I’d brought home from a gathering expedition when we were shooting the final episode of my new TV series.

With my oven already busy cooking the turkey, I like to make sure my Christmas Dinner starter is a simple assembly that doesn't require any cooking – and ideally it will be something I can prepare in advance.

Ham and turkey are the centrepieces of a traditional Christmas dinner, but here in New Zealand we often cook something on the barbecue as part of our festive feast. 

If you're looking for a quick and easy crowd-pleaser to launch your Christmas Day dinner, my Sesame Prawn Toasts are the answer. They're a snip to make, reasonably inexpensive if you use a bag of frozen prawn meat, and a hit with kids and adults alike.

For most of us, oysters are a special-occasion treat, so what better way to greet your guests on Christmas Day than with a champagne cocktail and a big platter of succulent oysters on the half shell.

At the start of Allison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It, there’s a fantastic scene that any busy working mother can relate to.  

I’m dreaming of a delicious Christmas. This year my theme for Christmas dinner is “traditional with a twist”, so I’ve put together a menu that takes classic dishes including bubbly cocktails, roast turkey and chocolate sponge roll in a new direction.

Some years ago I wrote a book about entertaining called Cooking to Impress Without Stress. I wrote it (as is the case with most of my books) for myself, as a template to seamlessly enjoying the process of having people over to eat at home.

Every year for as long as I can remember I have baked at least one Christmas cake. Given that no one in my family actually likes Christmas cake, this doubtless seems really odd. But making this special cake each year is one of those things that makes me feel like it’s actually Christmas.

Every summer when we were growing up, my mother would spend several weeks bottling the season’s harvests for the pantry.

Every Christmas when I was growing up, one of my mother’s friends would send us a repurposed shoebox filled with different kinds of homemade baking and other sweet treats. 

When I was a kid my family had the best holidays in and around Nelson, and as we headed out with nets to catch flounder in the estuary up near Cable Bay for this weekend’s episode of my new TV series, all the happy memories came flooding back.

I get so many comments about my big yellow Jeep that sometimes I think it’s more the star of my new television series than I am. 

Up until the advent of the huge stock truck in the early 1980s, sheep and cattle were moved around New Zealand by drovers. With a horse and a swag, these hardy types would walk their mobs to the sale yards, often taking weeks, sometimes months to reach their destination.

I’ve had the most incredibly busy time lately, promoting my new book and TV series Annabel Langbein The Free Range Cook: Simple Pleasures. I find the antidote to the increased pace is to reconnect with the outdoors – so the moment I got back to Wanaka I found myself out in the garden seeing how my vegetables are faring in this mad spring weather. 

At the end of a busy working day, I find that the last thing I want to do is think. The whole day has inevitably been about rushing around and trying to fit in too many things, so I just want to come home and have some wonderful fairy deliver a delicious dinner to my table.

In this week’s episode of my new television series Annabel Langbein The Free Range Cook: Simple Pleasures (screening 7pm Saturday 23 October on TV One here in New Zealand) I visit my friend Karen the lavender grower, who is always giving me snippets from her garden, and farmers Ben and Erika.

One of the things that struck me most whilst making the second series of my television show Annabel Langbein The Free Range Cook: Simple Pleasures was the passion and energy of the people we met along the way and the diversity of crops that are being grown and artisan food products that are being made in New Zealand these days.

We have been coming to Wanaka since our kids were toddlers, and for them as well as for Ted and I, it’s very much our home away from home.
Even though our cabin here is incredibly small, we still all love coming here to chill out and recharge our batteries. 

The Abel Tasman Coast Track is an incredible piece of landscape and has been named as one of New Zealand's Great Walks.

It’s been years since I've headed up in a chopper on a deer muster. As a teenager I worked for a couple of years trapping possums in the bush and spent some time jumping out of helicopters to recover live deer.

Whenever you’re filming on location, like we did when we were shooting the first episode of my new television series Annabel Langbein The Free Range Cook: Simple Pleasures at the Mt Maude vineyard in Central Otago, everyone is just holding their breath about the weather.

It’s always fun doing live telly. There’s a real energy there that keeps you in the moment, and when you know you’ve only got six minutes and you have to get two or three dishes done you really get your act together!

Just two more sleeps until my new television series Annabel Langbein The Free Range Cook: Simple Pleasures hits our screens here in New Zealand. The first episode screens at 7pm on Saturday night, and I can't wait to hear what you all think. 

There's nothing like the satisfaction of harvesting fruit straight from a tree and transforming it into something delicious.

This cute video clip has just arrived from my Dutch publishers Unieboek and reminded me of why the Netherlands would have to be one of my favourite countries on earth. As you can see from the video, my recent trip there was so much fun.

I’d never thought of myself as a cruise kind of a girl. I’d always been more a casual boatie type – cooking simple food in some tiny rigged-up galley, jumping off the boat for a swim in the sea, hanging a rod over the side to catch a fish – the kind of super-casual holiday we New Zealanders all know and love.

In a world increasingly geared to instant gratification, vegetable gardening doesn’t really play the game. The results are never instant – vegetables take weeks, sometimes months, from seed to harvest. But when it finally comes time to pick your home-grown crops (provided the slugs haven’t got to them first!), it becomes well worth the wait.

There seems to be a division in the world between cooks who never make the same meal twice, and cooks who find six or seven recipes, learn them inside and out, and recycle them endlessly without deviating from the ingredient list.

There's nothing quite like fresh produce straight from the garden. It was a big part of my childhood – my father Fred would come home from work each night and tend to his vegetable garden, offerings from which arrived washed and trimmed at the kitchen door, ready for my mother to cast her magic over them. 

My philosophy has always been that leading a good life is about friendships, community and time around the table. That’s why I love this time of year. After the busy-ness of Christmas this is a great time to relax, re-energise and reflect – and get all my friends over for a meal. 

I kicked off my feminist-hippy period as a teenager, leaving school at 16 (University Entrance successfully passed – whew!) to move up to the Whanganui River with my longtime boyfriend and fellow idealist, Murray, and his friend, Thom.

For years I’ve been disappointed by my turkey-cooking efforts because the bird has inevitably been dry and rather stringy. But then I discovered the magical, transforming effect of brining.

In the summer when I am down in Wanaka, I love getting up with the sun and wandering around my garden. There’s something incredibly still and soft about the land at this time of day­ – a hint of dew on the ground, everything looking so fresh and new.

If you're in New Zealand you might have noticed my face popping up on your TV screen this week. No, it's not a new series of The Free Range Cook - that'll be next year - but the latest installment of my Fresh Everyday campaign.

Paris has been basking in the most glorious Indian summer – clear blue skies, hot without being too hot and not a breath of wind. It could not have been more perfect for the launch of my cookbook Annabel au Naturel (the French version of The Free Range Cook) at the New Zealand Ambassador’s wonderful residence.

One of the things I enjoy most about eating out is the chance to sample really creative food made by other cooks and chefs. I love it when someone puts together an idea that works that I had never imagined or tasted before

Sitting here in the gloomy grey rain of an Auckland winter, it’s hard to imagine that just a couple of weeks ago I was frolicking in the clearest blue waters of the Aegean, having one of the best holidays of my life. 

It’s so much easier to cook a dish when you’ve seen it being made. Ideally, of course, this will be from the comfort of a kitchen stool, glass of wine in hand while you watch the cook at work and wait to eat whatever delicious concoction he or she is creating!

It was such a buzz to launch my book Annabel Langbein The Free Range Cook in London last week!

I have always loved the persimmon tree in our garden. It is such a pretty shaped tree and through the autumn the fruit hang like a profusion of deep orange lanterns.

As I write this, the first fire of the season is blazing in the hearth and the soothing smell of simmering chicken is giving the kitchen a welcoming homey feel. 

It’s always such a buzz being in Australia, where the whole world comes together around the table with the best food of every ethnicity, style and and flavour.

For weeks now, bakeries and stores have been seducing us with various versions of hot cross buns. The really yummy boutique bakery ones can be expensive, but actually they’re very easy to make at home and baking them is a lovely way to engage with the traditions of Easter.

When our kids were little I would spend hours each Easter creating elaborate Easter egg hunts around our Wanaka cabin.

Recently I drove over from Wanaka to visit my dear Aunt Liz on the remote farm where she lives near one of the hydro dams on the Waitaki River in North Otago. I get so inspired whenever I see Liz

There were still piles of snow on the ground when we landed in New York a week or so ago. Then, just like that, the sun came out. After one of the coldest winters in decades, the hardy were out in their T-shirts at this first hint of spring – but we stayed rugged up in full winter woolly mode.

I’ve just been in London for a busy round of meetings and interviews to publicise my TV series Annabel Langbein The Free Range Cook, which has just launched on UKTV’s Good Food Channel.

Just over a week ago I was in my garden at Wanaka, savouring the simple pleasures of zucchini and sweetcorn picked fresh at the end of a New Zealand summer.

Right now I am enjoying the full flush of summer harvests in my garden. My six zucchini plants are producing so profusely it’s hard to keep up with all the zucchini (or courgettes, as the French prefer to call them).

One of the things that often trips up vegetable gardeners is the time a seed or small seedling takes to grow to harvest. Crops like leeks, for example, are notoriously slow, taking three and a half to four months before you have something of a decent enough size to eat.

Luxury isn’t what it used to be. Less and less these days is it about being flashy or ostentatious or even necessarily expensive.

“Summertime and the living is easy, fish are jumping and the cotton is high…”

I’m very excited to be bringing you my first post. I’m joining the blogosphere to share bits and pieces of my life in food, great recipes I’ve stumbled over, interesting ways to cook and dishes that I have found worked really well in this busy run around life.