Dec 23, 2019
Angie Prendergast-Sceats once was an olive oil judge, where she had to watch out for vintages that tasted like "rancid feet" and "baby vomit" (such references really did appear on the flavour chart that's deployed in these contests).
But for the last three years, she's been the culinary director
and head chef of Two Good, which used recipes by top
chefs (Peter Gilmore, Christine Manfield, Ben Shewry) to create soups and
salads that would be sent to women in domestic violence shelters.
You'd order two soups: keep one and the other would be donated to
someone in a refuge. The food was cooked by women from shelters,
who were paid above-award wages to do so. In her role, Angie would
oversee this work – and there some memorable/hilarious times when
they did their cooking in a nightclub's not-so-conventional kitchen
– and she also ran Two Good's Work Work program, training long-term
unemployed women, refugees and disenfranchised people to help them
get jobs. It was far from the aggressive stereotype of a kitchen
where you could yell at someone to hurry up with the carrots; in
working with people who might not know how to hold a knife or are
still dealing with trauma, cooking 1000 meals a week is a different
kind of challenge.
We also talk about Angie's recipes – which appear in the new
Two Good cookbook, her memorable
trips to Japan (where she had nine bowls of ramen in five hours and visited a
1000-year-old miso shop) and what she's doing next with her
Angie's Food enterprise.