Hello and I am so delighted to be joined today by an absolute foodie legend the astonishingly successful cookery

author and magazine founder Donna Hay Australia's leading food editor and multi best-selling cookbook author whose food recipes and

sensational styling focus on basic ingredients simply prepared have set the benchmark for

food publishing the world over and inspired a whole new

generation of cooks myself included. Donna a very warm welcome.

Thank you, Liz. It's so lovely to have you here. Thank you.

And I should say actually, right at the beginning that Donna is wearing a very lovely leather skirt,

but it's slightly creaky.

It is.

It does sound like someone else is in the room with us, doesn't it?

I'm sorry, I thought it was a good choice for today.

It looks very stylish, but this is just audio sadly.

We'll have to post a picture to go alongside.

So Donna, how did this extraordinary passion for food start with you?

Well, I think it started way back when I spent the school holidays with my grandparents.

They had the most incredible, very, very large vegetable garden with a

strawberry patch and a couple of fruit trees and so every morning after breakfast

we'd spend the entire morning with my nana and my pop in the garden and I guess I didn't realize as the time being a small child I was just having fun with my grandparents but that kind of growing and nurturing and

planting the seeds with them and watching things grow and come back with my

parent who take me back on the weekends and that just having that appreciation that oh wow the green

beans you've planted are now ready and then we would go and cook with them or at

least I would help micro mud I guess them, like take the strings off the side and pod the peas and things like that.

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