Christine Chandler (pictured) is on a mission to bring ‘real’ cooking back into the home. A trained Chef and Home Economist, Christine Chandler ran a catering business in Sydney for 17 years. She has worked for many magazines, writing and developing recipes and has worked on photo shoots and for TV. She has a passion for cooking and has been with The Chefs Toolbox since it first opened 5 years ago.

Christine Chandler says there is a misconception out there that processed and packaged foods are quicker and easier to prepare than fresh ingredients. With so many advertisements promoting the convenience of packaged food, it isn’t difficult to see why most of us have become re-heaters, instead of cooks in the home.

When I left home twenty years ago my mother gave me a copy of The Commonsense Cookery Book and sent me on my way. To my mother’s generation, knowing how to cook was a life-skill no young person leaving home could do without. Now days almost everything can be bought processed, pre-cooked and packaged in your local supermarket. We don’t cook, we open a package and re-heat, and our general health and well being may be suffering because of it.

Christine Chandler told Australian Women Online, “Now days most women work and we have different stresses in our lives to our parents. But there is this misconception that it’s quicker and easier to open a jar than it is to actually have fresh ingredients.”

In her role as Product and Recipe Developer for The Chefs Toolbox, Christine Chandler looks after the training needs of more than five hundred consultants in Australia and more than fifty in New Zealand.

“We have a beautiful show room and I have a five metre long kitchen bench where I do the training and I also run corporate cooking classes here as well,” Christine said.

In her test kitchen located at head office of The Chefs Toolbox in Alexandria (Sydney), Christine teaches consultants to demonstrate how easy it is to prepare a delicious and nutritious home cooked meal using fresh ingredients. The consultants then pass on what they have learned in homes across Australia and New Zealand.

“I teach them how they can get great flavour from a few basic ingredients and how it’s much more cost effective to do this than to go and buy all the sauces in jars and packets,” Christine said.

“I bring cooking back into the home in our training sessions in a fun way by getting our consultants up to cook and to do the cooking with me so that they can see what fun it is. I teach them the easiest way to do things.”

“The consultants love to come for the training. Everyone gets a bit stale with their cooking but by coming along to the training they feel inspired again. I actually give them little tastings so that they can experience it and by experiencing it they tend to go out and cook it and offer it to their clients in their cooking parties.”

“The Chefs Toolbox is a fantastic concept. People are intrigued by it because we don’t just go and sell the products to clients. When we get there the consultant cooks a couple of recipes with the products from our range.”

For her recipes to stay fresh and relevant, Christine has to do a lot of research. “I rarely read novels, I read cook books. I have a huge collection of cook books spread over three rooms. I probably have around seven hundred cook books and I buy just about every food magazine that exists,” she said.

“I actually read the recipe and I can generally tell if the recipe is going to work or not. It might be that the recipe goes for six or seven paragraphs for the method, I cut that right back and give them point form on what to do. The consultants and the clients love it because it’s so simple.”

Members of the public can see Christine in action on The Chefs Toolbox website as she demonstrates how to cook several popular dishes including Vietnamese Rice Paper Rolls, which she assures me are very much in fashion at the moment.

“Some of the recipes on the website are treats but I aim to bring in healthy options and to bring all the cooking back into the home,” Christine said.

In addition to the ‘how to videos’ Christine Chandler has written dozens of recipes for the website and contributes new recipes every month.

When I ask her that inevitable question asked of all Chefs, ‘Do you cook at home and don’t you get sick of it?’ Christine assures me that she does indeed enjoy cooking at home. “I never ever get sick of cooking. I get tired, but I think the minute you get sick of it is the minute you should be out of the industry. It is about the passion and if you don’t have the passion you can’t create and you can’t keep other people inspired.”

“I also love to eat out because it’s a way of keeping up to date and seeing what chefs are doing and to see whether they’re in line with what’s happening in food magazines and it makes me think about what I should be doing with the recipes on the website and when training the consultants.”

Christine told me her favourite TV Chef is Jamie Olivier. “I’m an Essex girl, he’s an Essex boy. I was brought up in England and came to Australia when I was 27. Jamie makes things very simple and the feedback I’ve received from our consultants is that he is the one person who sticks in everyone’s mind. So if I’m relating to a Chef when I’m training our consultants, I always relate to Jamie.”

And as for Australian TV Chefs, Bill Granger is a firm favourite. “Our consultants relate more to him because he’s not a Chef. He learned to cook through the Women’s Weekly cookbooks and has made no secret of that.”

“Margaret Fulton is also fantastic. Her cookbook was the very first book I was given when I arrived in this country. You can’t beat Margaret Fulton for the basics. She’s for everyday cooks,” Christine said.

If you would like to learn more about how easy it can be to cook at home using fresh ingredients, Christine Chandler has written a cook book. The Cooking is Fun Cookbook is a selection of over 80 new and old favourites from the Home Cooking Guru herself and includes a bonus How to…DVD! Christine’s book is available from The Chefs Toolbox website for AUD$39.50.

And don’t forget to check out Christine Chandler’s recipes on The Chefs Toolbox website. There are dozens of easy to make recipes to inspire a return to home cooking.

I would like to thank Christine Chandler for speaking with Australian Women Online.