Road to recovery

There’s an unexpected problem that arises when interviewing a chef, particularly when they’ve just cooked for you – the food provides quite a distraction. Michael Van de Elzen, the smiling, bespectacled chef behind The Food Truck TV show and the Good From Scratch brand, has just opened a cookery school with his wife and business partner, Belinda, who’s also a trained chef. We are all sitting at one of the long wooden tables in their new building, with huge open windows letting in the beach breeze from nearby Muriwai, one of the stunning beaches that line the west coast of Auckland. On the table is the product of our morning’s work: a caramelised beetroot tarte tartin, topped with a roasted hazelnut and rosemary balsamic glaze, shaved parmesan and fresh rocket. It is so good that I have to abandon all attempts at professional manners and ask if I can polish off the leftovers.

With almost 30 years’ experience each, Mike and Bee (as Belinda is known) are the kind of talented gourmets who can create extraordinary meals with what seems like no effort at all. In between being interviewed, Mike, 47, goes out to collect ingredients from the bountiful garden the pair have planted, which feeds the cooking school. He’s boiling fresh beetroot and caramelising sugar and doing that chef thing where it looks as if he’s making it up as he goes along, but with the kind of skill and experience that means it’s like watching a jazz artist at work. In the cookery school spirit, I’m also wearing an apron and crushing hazelnuts and rolling out pastry. The idea for the Good From Scratch Cookery School has been the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for a long, long time