We Had To Put Our Lives On Hold

For popular cook Allyson Gofton, the past couple of years have brought one difficult challenge after another. In a courageously honest interview with Emma Clifton, she talks about her son’s frightening injury, the sadness of losing her good friend and mentor Tui Flower, and the challenges of being an older mum.

- Emma Clifton

​​​​​​You’ll have toast with your soup, won’t you? Good girl.” Allyson Gofton is buttering a pile of toast as we sit in the cosy kitchen of her Auckland home. Never one to turn down bread in general, I’m particularly thrilled to be well fed by one of New Zealand’s most familiar faces when it comes to food. For more than 30 years, Allyson has been helping Kiwi families make fast, delicious and healthy meals through her iconic TV show Food in a Minute, her columns in various magazines and newspapers, and her best-selling cookbooks. Based in both Auckland and in France with her husband Warwick and their two children, Jean-Luc (15) and Olive-Rose (11), Allyson is in the midst of organising her next cookbook, a compendium on baking with all the tips and tricks that used to be passed down from one generation to another. “Running a family and writing a book is like to trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together and you put a piece down, and you think you’ve got it in the right place, and then somebody comes in and yells at you because they can’t find their hockey stick, and then all of a sudden you can’t remember where the puzzle piece goes and it takes you two days to get back to where you were,” Allyson says drily. “It would be fantastic if I could just sit around and shut the world out for three months, but it’s not possible.”

Case in point: 15 minutes into our interview, a young dietitian, who has come to talk about working on the new cookbook, turns up, so we pause our chat while Allyson runs what might be the world’s loveliest job interview – so lovely, in fact, that the dietitian ends up staying for soup and toast as well. This, it turns out, is very Allyson – warm, kind and approachable.

Her kitchen is a home cook’s haven; I count 75 spices in her pantry. (“Did you also spot that they’re in alphabetical order?”)