Fiona Tomlinson
Thirty years ago, the chance of finding Annabel Langbein trudging around her garden in jeans, an old shirt and boots would be unlikely.
In the 1990s, Annabel was the height of sophistication in the cooking world. Looking glamorous and gorgeous, she had regular shows on television and radio, along with columns in newspapers and magazines.
Today, she still has those columns and she’s just as gorgeous, but she also has a down-to-earth presence that proves she’s in touch with nature, as well as being someone who can whip up a five-course meal and still look great at the end of it.
With more than 10,000 recipes behind her, Annabel is immersing herself in the earth with her love of gardening and now ceramics, working clay into art.
“I have a crazy-mad husband who gardens 20 acres here in Wānaka and will be out for 10 hours a day,” says Annabel. “But my garden is the vegetable and flower garden, and working in it helps me understand the rhythm of the seasons, whether it’s planting potatoes or growing some salad greens. It’s incredibly satisfying and rewarding, and you get fit, you’re outside and growing your own food, and not eating nasty chemicals.”
Everything talented Annabel turns her hand to thrives!
In one of her latest newsletters, Annabel talks about her book of 20 years ago called Cooking to Impress Without Stress. She wrote it because often friends would arrive for dinner and find her in the garden, the house a shambles and with no sign of any meal preparation.
“They would stand there wondering if they had the night wrong and I would often end up rushing around pulling a rabbit out of a hat so that we could have a decent meal,” she laughs.
Gardening has always had a strong pull for Annabel, who has recently begun sharing her adventures on Instagram, passing on her tips with a weekly video that takes viewers around her wonderful garden in the stunning Wānaka weather. One video had her hacking away at some beautifully vibrant perennials, doing what is called the Chelsea chop so they’ll produce more flowers. “It did look quite shocking, but it works – you get so many more flowers,” she laughs.
Annabel has a horticulture diploma, so she knows what she’s talking about, and she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Lincoln University.
“I decided to start the videos in spring and I aim to do it for 52 weeks because I think it might help other people who are getting into gardening,” she says.
“I think a lot of people get intimidated by gardening, in the same way they’re intimidated about cooking. And that’s due to cooking shows that set the bar really high and you can fail, but it’s such a simple thing to do if you know how.
“Wonderful things happen when you start a garden. Both [husband] Ted and I feel really energised by the food we eat out of our garden. You can give food to your neighbours or preserve it.”
And Annabel is still learning. She planted some Welsh spring onions that just kept growing and spreading over the garden “like a river”.
“I had to harvest them before they went to seed, and I ended up making this spring onion oil with heaps of ginger, a bit of soy sauce and salt,” she tells. “Now I can make these really yummy noodle salads and use that oil with a handful of fresh coriander or whatever other soft herbs I’ve got ready to pick.”
Annabel says if anyone makes one of her recipes, she only has to taste it to know it’s hers, which is quite an achievement after having developed so many.
“There was one time when I didn’t quite get it right, but I blame the hangover from the night before!” she laughs.
Annabel recalls working with a crew filming The Free Range Cook TV series at an A&P show. As the weather was terrible the night before, she and the others naturally thought filming would be cancelled, so they had a few too many drinks.
“But no, at 7am off we went,” she tells. “I was in charge of judging the preserves and pickles competition. And oh, my goodness, eating vinegar at seven in the morning when you’re feeling ropey is so terrible, beyond imagination! They were just pure vinegar, really, no other flavour, and then there was a jar of this absolutely delicious tomato thing. And I said, ‘Oh, this is a clear winner – it’s the most fantastic thing.’ Well, they phoned the woman who made it to tell her the good news and it was one of my recipes!”
They had to keep that bit quiet at the awards ceremony, she adds.
When Annabel last talked to the Weekly, she and Ted were off to Europe on their second trip to see if they could buy a house there. Their first attempt was disappointing, with Ted wanting a grand
old estate and Annabel wanting something a little more manageable.
Annabel loves to potter about with clay and even turned her hand to making her own gin. Cheers to that!
They had left a car in a garage in France with a coffee machine, picnic rug and a Thermos, ready for their return. In May this year, they headed back and ended up driving 10,000 kilometres in search of the right place.
“That wasn’t very sustainable of us,” says Annabel. “We went to Italy, France and Greece, and to be perfectly honest with you, even though we had the most beautiful cottage in Greece, when it’s 46 degrees, the only thing you can do is lie on the bed with the air conditioner going.”
Annabel feels a strong pull to Europe because her children, Sean, 31, and Rose, 29, live there. Rose enjoys travelling and is in South America at the moment, while Sean works and lives in London. It would be nice to have a home over there that they can all share.
However, Annabel says she was happy to return to New Zealand and the ceramics diploma she’d signed up for before leaving.
“I did miss the clay and I’ve loved getting back into it, even though it’s a bit of a commute driving to Dunedin every week,” she tells. “Once I get into the studio and start making things, I don’t want to be anywhere else.”
Annabel’s mother was a potter, so learning how to work with clay seems a nice connection for her. She admits that she sometimes gets a bit behind on the course work and has just got off the phone from requesting an extension for an essay. But she has a potter’s wheel at home and she’s passionate about the pieces she makes, and also the amount she is learning about glazes and different clays.
When Annabel isn’t in the garden filming weekly videos or doing course work for her diploma, she is a passionate preserver and now has her very own preserves library.
After the Christchurch earthquakes in 2011, a bank on her Wānaka property needed strengthening.
“Ted said that if we were having great big things jutting out of that bank, let’s turn it into a room,” she explains. “For years, it was just a room that you hated going into because it was dark and unwelcome with a rough concrete floor, and we would put all our junk in there.
“Now I’ve got this gorgeous room filled with my preserves and it’s quite fun because I’ve catalogued them all so I know when we’re nearly out of eggplant kasundi. This year, I want to try making rose petal jam. There’s a shelf waiting for it. If you turn up to someone’s house with a lovely bottle of homemade apricot jam, chutney or pickle, it’s just really nice.”
You can be sure that eventually rose petal jam or perhaps even some of Annabel’s ceramic pots will appear on the very successful Substack online newsletter Annabel creates with her daughter Rose. In fact, quite a few of the recipes are ones Rose has been developing and testing on her travels. They’re so good that Annabel encourages her to share them in the newsletter.
“It’s so lovely that Rose is enjoying working on it because I think initially when she came back to New Zealand and lived here, and we had the idea for the newsletter, she felt like she was stepping in my footsteps,” says Annabel.
“I think now she feels she’s got her own voice. She’s a great writer and I love the food she’s making. I often make it because it’s so yummy and even though we cook in the same way – and can finish each other’s recipes in the same way some people finish each other’s sentences – Rose’s food has this lovely fresh brightness and she uses flavours that I’m less familiar with. Now I’m never bored with my own cooking!”
When Rose was here, she helped Annabel launch her Wild Plum Gin Elixir called Bella, which is doing so well, it has already won awards, picking up a silver medal in the NZ Spirits Awards and a gold medal in the Junipers 2023 competition.
It’s her first foray into the world of artisan distilling and it began with her own home-grown Dublin Bay plums, plus 18 different aromatics and botanicals.
“It really is a labour of love to make because you have to prick each plum six or eight times before it goes into the vat,” explains Annabel.
And when her own plums ran out, they had to source some more.
“We had to get about six tonnes of plums for the last batch,” she says. “And it’s like grapes and wine – you can only make it once a year, when the plums are ripe, but we’re experimenting with freezing and other methods to see how we can make more to meet demand.”
Finally, it wouldn’t be a chat with Annabel without a recipe tip. This time, it’s for a drink and it’s a nice, easy one: Simply pour a slosh of her Wild Plum Gin Elixir over ice, then top up with chilled prosecco. Delicious!
