Ella Mittas is a writer and cook who lives and works in Melbourne, catering events and private functions. Her Greek heritage and fascination with traditional foods and cooking styles led her to live and work in Turkey and Greece.

Her debut cookbook Ela! Ela! (meaning 'Come, come' in Greek) is a heartfelt journey of knowledge in food, culture and belonging. She's now working on a novel, and we discuss where her writing began and how it has developed over time. She explains being motivated by the necessity to try new things, how she has navigated burnout balancing both her cooking and writing careers, and why creative work can’t always be fun.

Ella shared her recipe for Fakes, a Greek lentil soup, which has become an instant What Artists Eat classic.

Find us @whatartistseat on Instagram and our website www.whatartistseat.com.au

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Naarm/Melbourne based painter, teacher, home cook, romantic, Brooke Holiday lives where food meets feeling, and story meets still life. Her paintings, inspired by objects and domestic rituals, carry emotional weight: a bruised pear, a flicker of candlelight, a beloved market trip.

Food is her other creative language: barfi from her grandmother, a fridge frequently stocked with Salsa Verde, drop-in dinners and butter on everything. “Cooking is storytelling. It softens people.”

Brooke Holiday's recipe is Salsa Verde, which we made right after the interview and served on our oven baked snapper!

You can find Brooke Holiday's Salsa Verde recipe on our website!

Find us @whatartistseat on Instagram and our website www.whatartistseat.com.au

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Annie-Rose Maloney has a simple ethos when it comes to writing a song: it must have a pulse, it must feel nice to sing, and it must bear a truthfulness about our human experiences.

We talked about the mixed bag of emotions that come with releasing music, the decisions she’s had to make to be uncompromising with her art and the nourishment that comes from growing her own food and sharing meals with her bandmates during rehearsals. 

The seven songs on Circle Walking are all tethered by being grounded in deep truth, and came out “a bit like an exhale - I almost always cried when I wrote them.” It was written over many years without any set intention, songs often blooming subconsciously from a seed of a lyric, or melody line - “I tended to let things reveal themselves to me. Like an archaeologist uncovering a hidden and delicate treasure.”

Annie-Rose's recipe is a garden pie, which is packed full of any veggies you have around, in crispy filo pastry.

You can find Annie-Rose Maloney's Garden Pie recipe on our website!

Find us @whatartistseat on Instagram and our website www.whatartistseat.com.au

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Emily Wurramara (she/her) has had a huge past 12 months. After her historic win at the ARIA awards, and in celebration of her multi award winning album ‘NARA’, she has announced an encore tour. Emily is a Lutruwita/Tasmania-based artist, activist, author and proud Warnindhilyagwa woman hailing from Groote Eylandt & Milyakburra/Bickerton Island.

Emily reflects on her formative experiences with music, such as learning the violin as a child, and the sensory memories of the foods she grew up with. The conversation also explores the financial challenges and realities that artists face, with Emily emphasising the importance of financial education and sustainability in the music industry. Throughout the discussion, Emily emphasises the power of art, music, and food to connect, express, and nourish the soul.

Emily shares her Pork Adobo recipe with us, which reminds her of her childhood, family gatherings and her Lola's perfectly balanced flavours.

You can find Emily Wurramara's Pork Adobo recipe on our website!

Find us @whatartistseat on Instagram and our website www.whatartistseat.com.au

Support What Artists Eat on Patreon!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Manisha Anjali is a writer and an artist. She is the founder of Neptune, a research and documentation platform for dreams, visions, and hallucinations.

She is the author of Naag Mountain, published by Giramondo in April 2024. Naag Mountain was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award at the Queensland Literary Awards in 2024.

Manisha grew up in Suva, Fiji, surrounded by nature, food and books. She has a deep connection to storytelling and mysticism, which we explore in our chat. Living in Melbourne currently, maintaining that connection is something Manisha finds extremely important to do.

Talking about art and food, she says "...they make life worth living. Food is a physical necessity and art is the soul’s necessity, so you’re feeing your soul with art and you’re feeding your body with food and you just need both to enjoy this time on earth."

Manisha shares her Dhal recipe with us and explains that growing up she’d have it almost every day. It was the foundation for everything else she ate. She associates it with a comfortable and homely feeling.

You can find Manisha Anjali's Dhal recipe on our website!

Find us @whatartistseat on Instagram and our website www.whatartistseat.com.au

Support What Artists Eat on Patreon!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Francesca Gonzales is many things. She’s a psychology student, musician, songwriter, vocalist, key-tar player and facilitator. She’s a staunch advocate for artists’ mental health and finds herself constantly thinking about how she can help artists figure out what’s best for themselves in an industry that leaves many people miserable and burnt out.

Francesca is obsessed with promoting and facilitating mental health for artists. She started out as a musician and really wanted to connect with people. As she pursued music, she found herself alone a lot of the time and it felt wrong. She soon found that many people were feeling the same way, so she created Breakfast Club meet-ups as a way to come together with her peers and foster an environment where artists could support each other and learn from each other.

You can sign up to Breakfast Club events via Fran's instagram https://www.instagram.com/francescagonzales___/

You can find Fran's Chicken Pilaf recipe on our website!

Find us @whatartistseat on Instagram and our website www.whatartistseat.com.au

Support What Artists Eat on Patreon!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rochelle Siemienowicz grew up as a strict Seventh Day Adventist. Her first experiences of art (particularly writing) was the bible. In terms of food, she went through a renaissance in culinary life when she left the church and was in her early 20’s.

Her latest novel ‘Double Happiness’ is a love story loosely inspired by her own journey of polyamory.

“The journey of writing this latest book has been one of learning to set boundaries and learning to priortise my own need to create over other people’s needs” - she says.

Rochelle believes that food and art are both about nourishment of the body and the soul, sharing, expressing one's individuality, and sometimes for her: rebellion.

You can find Rochelle's Upside-Down Pear & Almond Flan recipe on our website!

Find us @whatartistseat on Instagram and our website www.whatartistseat.com.au

Support What Artists Eat on Patreon!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a recording of a live panel talk from North Gallery in Fitzroy presented by Food For Everyone.

It was during Gem Leslie's exhibition called 'Pantry Study', where she visited and painted multicultural pantries around Melbourne.

Our guests were Jaclyn Crupi - author of several books on food including PASTA LOVE and GARDEN LIKE A NONNO about her Italian pantry.

Kira Hosking - creative consultant and recipe writer about her Japanese pantry, and food programmer Adriana Bradica Watson about her Croatian pantry.

We talked about the migrant experience, living in multicultural Melbourne and the complexities of assimilation.

We also spoke about how cooking can connect us to our ancestry and where to find the best Japanese, Italian, Croatian and Hungarian food in Melbourne.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fred Mora of Long Prawn jokes that sometimes he’s the prawn’s head and sometimes, the tail. He’s not quite artist, not quite cook, somewhere in between.

Fred and his creative collaborator Lauren Stephens are Long Prawn, a collective using food as a springboard to start conversations that traverse big ideas and observe parts of culture that have fallen out of focus. They have held various events and happenings over the past 8-10 years, working with chefs, artists, musicians and growers of food.

Growing up, the energy at the Mora family table was theatrical, warm and chaotic. Yum cha every weekend was a solid ritual and cheekiness was a core value for some family members. Fred’s grandmother, (treasured artist Mirka Mora) was apparently treacherous at the dinner table, especially when dining out. She would demand dessert first, then steak.

It makes sense then that Fred has pursued his own creative food interests. Tax Vinegar is a project he toiled away at for some time, with beginnings as curious experiments during one of Melbourne’s numerous pandemic lockdowns. He tells us that the breadth and depth that vinegar can add to your meal is huge - “it’s like turning the brightness up on your phone screen”.

Fred’s recipe is mayonnaise and you can hear our genuine excitement in the interview -  we were so delighted by this as we had seen the film ‘Monsieur Mayonnaise’ by Fred’s uncle years ago and loved it.

The film is the true story of Fred’s grandfather Georges during the French resistance. His spy name was Monsieur Mayonnaise, due to his rescuing and smuggling of children over borders using mayonnaise as his weapon. With artist Marcel Marceau, he discovered that if you could put enough mayonnaise on a baguette you would be able to hide documents in it and smuggle it past the gestapo. As the gestapo were fastidious about not getting their uniforms dirty, every time Georges passed a check point he was able to smuggle documents through. The trick was that there needed to be a certain amount of mayonnaise on the baguette - if you passed a certain threshold of it, the  guards wouldn’t bother to check it.

You can find Fred's mayonnaise recipe on our website!

Find us @whatartistseat on Instagram and our website www.whatartistseat.com.au

Support What Artists Eat on Patreon!

Links to anything we chatted about:

• Long Prawn
• Tax Vinegar
• Australian Food Timeline
• Collingwood institution Raffles
• Stefanino Panino 
• Ruthie Rogers and Rose Gray of River Cafe 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jess Ribeiro is a lover of many things, including creation myths, deep sea creatures and fancy European service stations.

Jess’ upbringing in a small country town, steeped in the energy of Chinese restaurant kitchens, provided a unique backdrop for her artistic and culinary evolution. Her Hong Kong-born father found solace in these kitchens, where Cantonese was more than a language—it was a connection to his roots in a place far from home. This blend of cultures and cuisines laid the foundation for Jess's appreciation of diverse narratives and flavours.

During our chat, Jess challenges the stereotype of the starving artist, emphasising the richness of spirit that creative pursuits bring. In her own words, "We are communicators. We feed the soul of human beings." This ethos underscores her belief in the profound impact of art—be it a poignant song or a captivating painting—to inspire, provoke thought, and ignite new possibilities.

Her album ‘Summer of Love’, made during one of Victoria’s numerous lockdowns whilst staying solo at the Point Lonsdale Guesthouse is out now.

You can find Jess's recipe on our website!

Find us @whatartistseat on Instagram and our website www.whatartistseat.com.au

Support What Artists Eat on Patreon!

Links to Jess's work and anything else we chatted about:

• Website
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Youtube
• Bandcamp
• Merch
• Spotify
• Apple Music
• Tour
• Leah Senior
• Amy Chaplin: macrobiotic chef in NYC
• “The UK’s best service station”
• The Point Lonsdale Guest House

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.