About Roots Recipes & Reasons

Roots, Recipes, Reasons shares the pleasures of our table, the recovery of endangered flavours and creation of new ones and our agrarian adventures as we attempt to tread a little more lightly on the planet today than we did yesterday.

It reflects the love, memories and connection with friends and family, the terrior of the land and sense of place through the foods we grow.

It traces the ongoing conversation between generations of plants and families and our shared food heritage and culinary diversity.

It’s a celebration of the beauty and wisdom of nature, its web of life, the changing parade of the seasons and the abundant harvest that abounds from nurtured soil.

Roots Recipes Reasons explores the culinary landscape of a gardener, cook, forager, artisan and writer in the quest to find beauty, balance and meaning in our noisy, disconnected and contradictory world.

Explore Roots to discover what comes from the land, Recipes to transform nature’s abundance and Reasons to unearth our culinary linage.

About Kate

As a child, I spent countless spring Sunday family outgoings in the verdant undulating hills of the Yarra Valley. The expeditions always started with a lingering fog being chased away by the rising sun, layers of clothing being progressively discarded and gumboots sloshing through sodden low lying paddocks; but they ended with my favourite Sunday dinner. 

A mountain of earthy brown mushrooms, served on toast which absorbed the dark rich buttery sauce. While dad, my two brothers and our trusted Australian Terrier companions, Rusty and Lassie hunted rabbits, mum and I searched the hills for the field mushies. While the mushroom fields have given way to the urban sprawl and dad, Rusty and Lassie chase rabbits in another world, the anticipation and reward of foraging, the sense of belonging to a family and the land and the taste of the earth continue to inspire and motivate me.

Whether it's been foraging for food or learning to cook from Auntie Ollie, working the land and managing a dairy of 903 Friesians and Jersey’s before moving into the hospitality industry, studying confiserie at Ecole La Nôtre in France, promoting Australian food products in Hong Kong, working as a food educator for the Good Food Foundation delivering Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food  program and in the retail sector or conducting sustainable kitchen gardens workshops and presentations; growing, cooking and sharing food has been the axis in my life.

After a successful career with my husband as a restaurateur for 18 years and receiving multiple industry and business awards, we now live on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. Together we tend a large productive vegetable garden and orchard and I spend my time preserving nature’s bountiful harvest and sharing the pleasures of our table. 

My fascination for food, agrarian adventures and hankering to understand the past, present and future culinary landscape fills my life and is shared though Roots, Recipes, Reasons.