Please don’t read this interview if you’re hungry. Sarah has a keen imagination for flavour pairings and simple, wholesome dishes that will make you rethink your pantry staples and quite possibly propel you into your kitchen to follow her lead.

Sarah’s method for Zucchini Rice, is such a cool trick to discover. She’s got the timing of this risotto-ish dish down, and I’ll be leaning on the rhythm of this recipe for sure. Hot tip: I added saffron to the zucchini rice for a subtle sweetness. A bit posh, but if you’ve got it, use it.

Enjoy her musings on kitchen gardens, culinary school fails, and a relaxed approach to serving up a family meal. You’ll get a real sense of her semi-rural home, bound by fresh New Zealand air and ample green space. Blame photographer Tim Hillier for that. He’s captured the early morning stirrings of family life so sweetly.

Name: Sarah Larnach
Occupation: Visual Creative (artist, illustrator, art director)
Location: Titirangi, Auckland, New Zealand
Family members: Sarah, Genevieve and Claude (2.5 yo)

We are a New Zealand/Aussie-Phillipino family of two mums and a daughter. Genevieve and I met in Sydney. We then moved back to my homeland, NZ, and Claude arrived 7 years later. Claude is a lucky wee kid who also has a doting donor-dad, Tim who lives in Melbourne and visits us regularly.

Our semi-rural property needs a fair bit of love to make it a functional family place, so we’re a busy bunch. Genevieve is a builder and I’ve been working part-time from home since Claude was born. I have two album art projects on the go for my two favourite clients/collaborators Ladyhawke and Passenger. In album art, I do various things from creative direction, through to original artwork and package design.

Gardening is my buzz. For the love of it as well as giving us tasty seasonal produce that’s travelled a few feet to our door. GV (Genevieve) has built all our garden beds as we live on a big lump of clay. Our favourite family time is to get away to my cousin’s beach house in a sweet little community in Northland, where Claude plays in the creek and everyone knows our dog and we’re related to almost everyone and someone usually has some fish to share.

Before kid-life, we had a friend over to dinner every Thursday. We would cook elaborate meals but that’s just not possible any more. We used to live in the city and have a weekly date night, trying new joints and eating at our favourite places too. Pre-kid I was really getting into preserving and that’s something I’m able to do again now that Claude is a bit more independent. Preserving is most definitely the hobby that I do for my own enjoyment and I will not be confusing it with a hustle. Like the dork I am, I have an Instagram account for my preserving to share recipes and talk preserving with other preserving nerds. I was a bit embarrassed when my friends found it, but I guess I’m “Out” of the preserving cupboard now.

Cooking from a recipe isn’t my usual thing. But I do flick through cookbooks and Pinterest and subscribe to food podcasts to get inspiration. Using seasonal, local fruit and vegetables is definitely important, as is having a largely plant-based diet. I adapt recipe ideas to use what I have at hand and leftovers are future ingredients ... or builder’s lunch.

Once upon a time I loved cooking so much that I went to culinary school for 6 months – a huge mistake! Working in the kitchen killed the joy for me. If there’d been other paths in food visible to me, like all of the creative hustles clever people have going today, I might have found a way to make food my career. Luckily, I love cooking again and am grounded and relaxed by spending an hour or two cooking in the evening, especially in our open plan home. I really missed that relaxed cooking time in the first 18 months after Claude was born.

The smell of chickpeas cooking makes me feel like a safe happy kid. When I was little there were bi-fold windows from the kitchen onto a veranda, and I’d stand on a bench outside the window and talk to mum while she cooked. When I was a teenager I remember saying “What’s for dinner?”, as I did every night, and one night Mum flying off the handle with something like “I don’t know yet! I’ll make it up as I go along! It drives me crazy that you ask that every night!” … but what we figured out that evening was that I actually wanted to know if it was something that I could help with because I wanted to cook with her, so I began to cook with her most nights and was in charge of one meal a week.

We work with the adult/kid palette disparity by eating build-your-own dishes. Things like rice bowls, quesadillas, noodles and hearty salads, where we can tailor our own toppings. GV and I looked at our attitudes to food and the food rules we were raised with and figured that the healthier adult habits had come from a low pressure and joyful approach to eating. When we are at other homes we follow the rules a la mode, but at our house, Claude doesn’t have to stay at the table or finish her meal. She can graze on dinner for an hour if she likes.

In order to get us fed before everyone has a melt-down, I usually cook part of a meal early. This could be something like rice, so Claude gets to eat that early with some quick cooked or raw vegetables and a bit of fish. I’ll then get the rest of the “adult meal’ cooked and Claude will hopefully eat again with us mums a bit later. It’d be great if we all ate together but GV is often not home until after 7.30 pm.

Quite often Claude has a bath in a flexitub in the kitchen while I'm cooking. It’s a sweet arrangement, near the fire in the winter. We can keep an eye on her or we can socialise, and the bathwater goes on the garden in the morning.

Claude gets to help cook if she wants. It can be carnage but she usually eats more if she helped make it. She asks to bake scones and cake and pikelets already and it’s messy and she’s a butter thief, but I reckon we’re off to a good start. Our labrador, Nutmeg, is wonderful for keeping the floor clean with a baby/toddler/kid. The spray-mop is great for cleaning up after the dog’s been though.

Growing and collecting produce from our garden is a great activity for her. The kid thinks that zucchini are cucumbers and I’m not correcting her if she wants to eat them off the vine. She would really like to pet a bee and is having a hard time with the “they’re-our-friends but will-sting-you” thing. Waiting until tomatoes are ripe is another challenge but it’s cool that she has the chance to find these things out. I would really like it if Claude wanted to garden when she’s out on her own. I’m hoping cooking will be a given, whether she loves it or just likes it. But growing your own food feels like a skill to be encouraged for the social, ecological, and the responsibility of it all.

I had a radish patch from age 3 or 4 and sang to my radishes which, family lore has it, grew huge and crisp, but I never ate them. My grandfather was a great gardener (his kids and all of his grandchildren also garden) and I really liked being in his garden, as well as my mum’s. The memory of eating his sun-hot tomatoes and basil in white bread sandwiches while sitting at the table with Grandma is making my stomach growl now.

My top three essential ingredients? Red onions, because no one ever complained about a sweet onion in a dish, plus any unused raw onion becomes “Pink Quickle” that GV and I eat it with everything. Ground almond meal, because it keeps for ages in the freezer, goes a long way, is protein-rich and adds a slightly sweet, creamy richness to everything from curries (replacing cream) to pesto (replacing pinenuts), dips, on cereal and in smoothies. And tinned beans and lentils. Yes, I can soak and cook my own, but I probably haven’t thought to do it, so now its approaching dinner time and I can open a can of black beans, pinto or borlotti and give a few to Claude to snack on, while the rest of the can goes into a pot with a stock cube and simmers away to get mashed and go with a Mexican or Caribbean inspired meal. White beans, same method but pureed with some thyme or rosemary is great with western euro meals. A can of lentils simmered with a sweated onion, a stock cube and a bay leaf is the best last-minute addition to roasts or BBQs, especially when one more body has been added to the diners at the last minute.

Most dog-eared cookbook pre and post parenthood: Saving The Season by Kevin West (a modern preserving book that really got me into making preserves of all kinds), and Jerusalem or Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi (me and everyone else, right, but his style and go-to flavours appeal me).

Time-saving tip or food hack: 1. Making polenta in the rice cooker is fool proof. 2. Keep a pair of long nose pliers in the utensil drawer for de-bearding mussels and pulling those plastic ring-pull caps of soy sauce bottles, and a hundred other things.

Favourite local kid-friendly restaurants: Fish and chips at the beach.

Zucchini Rice, Not Quite Risotto.

Claude will eat this with other ingredients when she’s interested in food, or on its own with cheese if she’s in a bland kick. It makes a decent vehicle for so many other foods and can be turned into fair oven-baked arancini the following night if there’s any leftover.

1 ¼ cup short grain rice
2 cups of stock, or equivalent cubes and water
1 ½ cups water
2 tbsp olive oil
½ an onion, chopped finely
1½ to 2 cups of grated or finely chopped zucchini and a second vegetable*

*Good additions are corn, carrot, silverbeet*, cherry or roasted tomatoes, snow peas, garden or frozen peas. If the second veg is a delicate one, like silverbeet, cherry tomatoes or peas, I add it after the rice is cooked.

In a medium pot, sweat the onions and vegetables in oil and a pinch of salt until soft and fragrant. Cooked over a mellow heat the salt draws out water from the vegetables and prevents scorching.

Throw in the stock and water (3 ½ cups liquid in total) and the rice. Stir, keep on a medium-low heat, and on goes the pot lid.

Prepare other meal elements while mostly ignoring the rice. I’ll cock the lid if it’s in danger of boiling over. Stir occasionally to make sure it’s not sticking or drying out. You can add more water if needed, a ¼ cup at a time.

When the rice is just cooked, toss through the second vegetable if necessary, and grated cheese if that’s the vibe. Let it sit with the lid on but cocked. If it’s too wet, sit with the lid off and hopefully steam will cure the problem. This rice can sit around for an hour and remain pretty warm so I make it the first item in my dinner routine.

This dish makes a really great base for fried fish or prawns and something green on the side like a bitter or herby salad. Claude likes the rice with cheese stirred through, with sausages or fish and something crunchier like tomatoes or steamed broccoli.

Genevieve and I like this dish with a wee dent in the middle to spoon in a nugget of butter and balsamic or tasty vinegar. A crunchy element like toasted nuts or quickly pan-toasted oats/oil/salt on top is always a good time.