Nici Wickes
Nici Wickes is the author of More from a Quiet Kitchen, A Quiet Kitchen, World Kitchen and Cook Eat Enjoy. Nici spent six years as food editor and restaurant reviewer for Viva, NZ Herald, five years creating, testing, and styling over one thousand recipes each year for New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, as well as contributing food-related content and recipes for radio and other media. Her food travel show World Kitchen, filmed over four years, ran for five seasons and still airs around the world.
2024 festival sessions
A Quiet Kitchen
Nici Wickes in conversation with Tania Miller
Nici was the Instagram foodie we all needed during lockdown - down to earth, great fun, and cooking up a storm with mostly pantry ingredients. Her gorgeous cookbooks A Quiet Kitchen and the just-released More from a Quiet Kitchen include many of those recipes along with her honest reflections on her struggle to find contentment in mid-age, how she finds happiness in living alone in a quiet coastal community, and where she draws inspiration from. Most of her recipes serve one or two and serve to inspire those who also live alone, though many are easily scaled up if you have friends over. Nici says: “I want this book to be a cookbook but also a guide to becoming accomplished at living alone, healthily, joyfully, quietly, whilst still feeling engaged and connected to the world and staying open to the mystery of it all.” Hear Nici talk with Tania about her cookbooks, her mid life sea change, and how choosing to eat well goes hand in hand with choosing to live well.
Cook, Eat, Travel
Nici Wickes in conversation with Belinda Jackson
Nici's career reads like a dream come true and she admits to sometimes having to pinch herself. Restaurant reviewer, food writer, presenter for a TV food and travel show, and now cookbook author! Sharing her enthusiasm for cooking, eating, and travel, Nici will let us in on how she creates new recipes, how she got to star in her own TV cooking show, World Kitchen, and what it was like to get her dream job as food editor for the esteemed New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, only to see it fall away during Covid. If you've ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of making a food and travel show or how food writers and cookbook authors come up with new recipes all the time, then come along to hear Nici's tales of all. Her various roles have paved the way to her latest cookbooks, which feature delicious recipes, most serving one to two people households, alongside personal stories for living well alone. Nici talks about a career of food writing, the fun times she has experienced and the happy place she finds herself in today with Belinda Jackson.