Former MasterChef New Zealand winners Chelsea Winter (left) and Nadia Lim are going head to head with new cookbook titles.
Nadia is braising bunnies. Chelsea swears you won’t notice there’s cauliflower in the sushi. And the person leaving the celebrity cookbook kitchen tonight?
Depends how you feel about skinning a rabbit. (See also: Bone broth brownies).
Nadia Lim and Chelsea Winter, respective winners of MasterChef New Zealand seasons two and three, have gone head-to-head with October cookbook releases.
I begged for copies and fell on them like cake.
They are the country’s most popular contemporary home cooks; women so famous that, in the food world at least, they don’t need surnames.
Chelsea lives on a lifestyle block in Taranaki with her children Sky and Sage, and her seventh recipe collection Tasty was New Zealand’s bestselling overall book in 2024.
Nadia, meanwhile, has produced at least a dozen books, and is three seasons deep into a television show documenting her life at Royalburn Station in Central Otago, where she farms with husband Carlos and their three boys, Bodhi, River, and Arlo.
Nadia describes Nadia’s Farm Kitchen ($55) as her “best book to date”. In the gluten-free corner, Chelsea claims Nourish ($50) has “more purpose and intention than anything I’ve done before”.
Wooden spoons at the ready, silicone spatulas at dawn – it’s the clash of the Christmas cash cows and there can only be one winner winner chicken dinner!
Begin by judging the book by its cover.
Chelsea’s features a lamb shoulder only marginally plumper than her own. The parsimonious roast is served with broccolini, whipped feta and a delicious glass of . . . water? I know we should all eat less meat (and the author was, until recently, vegan), but this is the kind of portion control I’d expect from a David Seymour-approved school lunch box.
Down on the farm, Nadia leans against a creaky, lichen-stained door festooned with dead rabbits. There is a pitchfork to her right and lord knows what’s in her casserole dish. The only thing standing between this cover and a Stephen King plot is three beetroots and a savoy cabbage.
To the opening double-page spreads, where we learn (a) Nadia has a cute farm, and (b) Chelsea has cute kids. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
We’re here for the food and, after about five years of reading (Nadia), liberal use of the word “balance” (Chelsea) and three full-page photographs of hydrangeas (also Chelsea – does she know they are poisonous to humans?), I finally encounter some recipes.
A great chef once told me even the very best cookbook will only contain three recipes you’ll want to make again. True or false? I think it depends on your understanding of the word “recipe” and, in Chelsea’s case, “bagels”.
Dear reader, there are simply not enough inverted commas in the world to explain her “recipe” for apple “bagels” three ways, but I will try: Take one whole apple. Remove central core. Slice the apple into rings.
I think you can see where this is going and it is absolutely nowhere near a bagel.
Non-recipes are the new recipe. Witness Nigella Lawson and the avocado toast debacle, Simone Anderson’s frozen grapes and absolutely any cookbook with a sandwich on its cover.
Nadia’s nasturtium leaf with goat cheese, strawberry and honey is not the worst example in the genre. Nevertheless, in my humble opinion, six pages for a seven-ingredient no-cook canape is overkill. The recipe makes 20 morsels “ideal for spring and summer gatherings” and I swear I watched each one manifest in real time.
If both books are picture-heavy, Nadia’s takes the (upside-down plum and cardamom) cake.
“Having grown up in the tropics and later in Auckland, waking up to a snow-covered landscape still feels like a fairytale,” she writes. “What still blows my mind about living down here is how abrupt and on-time the seasons are. It’s as if nature has set an alarm clock.”
Proof of scientific concept? Several million pages of photographs of the farm at various stages of the Earth’s axial tilt.
In Nadia’s seasonally-organised world, you cook spring ramen before summer-into-autumn pudding, and vine-ripened gazpacho before coq au vin.
Chelsea’s layout also follows the natural order of things. Dinner is followed by sweet treats, breakfasts, lunches, snacks, basics, celebrations and poultices. (Take one large potato and stop laughing because I am truly not making this recipe up.)
There is, of course, much to love about both books. I will not, on principle, pay for a recipe that tells me how to scramble eggs, but I understand this is knowledge that can save lives, cure hangovers and plug the skills gap in a country where the government has just proposed removing more food-related subjects from the school curriculum.
I digress.
Chelsea’s breezy, matey, Insta-friendly speak has earned her a legion of fans and if you are among them, then BOOM you ain’t gonna be disappointed. *bows to bestselling author*
I will be making Chelsea’s turbo teriyaki chicken because it looks delicious and her pitch (“this recipe is going to take the country by storm”) is so confident. Ditto, her chicken pie 2.0 because, “you wouldn’t believe the secret ingredients in the sauce are cauliflower, hemp seeds and basil leaves . . . it’s gonna be a lifer. I guarantee it.”
Meanwhile, on page 146: “Cauliflower is more nutritious than white rice . . . Which makes these sushi rolls utter genius, because I guarantee a lot of people won’t be able to tell the difference when they eat them!”
Is Chelsea sponsored by Big Cauli? (I had planned to test the sushi hypothesis on my colleagues but they work in media and their lives were sad enough.)
From Nadia’s collection, I immediately earmarked the brown butter miso mushroom noodles, instructions for making fresh ricotta and a recipe for sunflower oil focaccia. At Royalburn, between one and four million sunflowers are planted annually. Seeds that haven’t been ravaged by mice or birds or people jumping the fence to pose naked in a sunflower field (true story) are sent to Christchurch for cold-pressing which is a potentially expensive pathway to flatbread, but so is a bottle of supermarket olive oil.
In 2019, American food writer Helen Rosner noted the internet should have killed cookbooks. Instead, cookbooks had reinvented themselves: “Recipes still mattered, but now they existed in service of something more – a mood, a place, a technique, a voice,” Rosner wrote.
Aotearoa’s kitchen queens achieve this in spades and/or pitchforks. This kind of compare and contrast review is only possible because Nadia and Chelsea are so fully invested in their respective points of view. Rabbits are a farm pest, so some people shoot and eat them. Cauliflower has fewer carbs than rice, so some people use it as an alternative in sushi.
Nadia says farming is humbling in every possible way. She wants you to feel more connected to the origins of your food - to understand what it takes to produce a bag of flour, a tomato, an egg, a chicken breast or a litre of milk.
Chelsea wants you to know that healthy eating need not be overly complicated, or expensive, or strict - she advocates simple ingredient swaps (spelt flour instead of bleached white flour; coconut oil instead of refined seed oils) and says “homemade and natural is where it’s at”.
We are what we eat. And, really, you should just buy whichever book you like best. On this, I am certain Nadia and Chelsea would agree: Nothing is more delicious and life-affirming than going with your gut.
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on its lifestyle desk. She is a former restaurant critic and has a master’s degree in gastronomy.