The celebrity chef and star of upcoming series Nadia’s Farm Kitchen takes us through her fascinating life in television.
Although it was well over a decade ago that she made her television debut as a contestant on MasterChef New Zealand, Nadia Lim still remembers exactly how it felt: terrifying. “I think people assume that anyone who’s in the media or on TV is going to be an extroverted person, and I’m really not,” she says. Her fear of being on television was so great that she enrolled in a two week crash course before filming to get more comfortable on camera. “At the start, I couldn’t even look at a camera without my lip quivering because I was so nervous,” she says.
Eventually winning the series and going on to be a MasterChef judge, as well as fronting her own series like Nadia’s Comfort Kitchen, Nadia’s Farm, and now Nadia’s Farm Kitchen, Lim has found her “happy place” in cooking on camera. Where the last two seasons of Nadia’s Farm followed Lim and her husband Carlos Bagrie as they swapped the hustle for the harvest in Central Otago, her new series Nadia’s Farm Kitchen returns to the heart of the home, centred around recipes and highlighting local producers and ingredients.
“I was really excited to get to do a cooking show again because obviously I feel most at home in the kitchen,” she says. “It’s just very natural to me to be cooking something and talking about it.” And in a cost of living crisis, she hopes her celebration of cooking with local, seasonal produce will resonate. “Regardless of when times are good or when times are hard financially, you should always stick to the basics of good food sourcing: always eat local and always eat in season,” she says. “Please, whatever you do, do not buy peaches in winter.”
Her other biggest cost-cutting tip is bulk cooking, which she says she regularly deploys for her busy household of three young boys. “It just saves you time and it saves you from having that dinner panic attack and then shopping for one specific meal,” she says. Lately she’s been doing a bulk slow-cooked lamb ragu with a cinnamon stick, tomatoes and wine. “I’ve nearly been overdoing it but I love it – have it with gnocchi one night, or have it with mashed potato and roasted carrots another night. It’s one of life’s great hacks.”
And if all of that has made you hungry, Lim has also generously dished up her deliciously rich life in television for us, including going viral with Leigh Hart and a secret KFC ad cameo.
My earliest TV memory is… I grew up in Mount Albert in Auckland, and I have quite a clear vision of me watching our old TV, which was one of those very wide box TVs. I’m the oldest, so I was an only child at the time, about three or four years old, and I remember sitting on the carpet with the afternoon sun streaming in, and watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The show I used to rush home from school to watch was… At high school it was Home and Away. I think it was the fact that they were teenagers, it just intrigued me. Although their lives were much more exciting than mine – they all had boyfriends and drama going on and I was a geek who didn’t have anything going on.
Nadia Lim at home in Nadia’s Farm Kitchen.
My first TV crush was… Jamie Oliver. I was 12 years old when he was on The Naked Chef and I just loved how he was so enthusiastic and so excitable about food, because that was me – I was like the female version of him. I’d never come across anyone who was so, so obsessed with food and I just completely resonated with him when I watched him. From that point on, my dream was to meet Jamie Oliver and marry him. Obviously that didn’t work out.
The TV moment that haunts me is… Straight after MasterChef – I was such a rookie – I agreed to go on Late Night Big Breakfast with Leigh Hart and Jason Hoyte and I’ll never get rid of it. It went viral, not just here but overseas. I’ve been traveling overseas, and people have come up to me and said, “you’re the girl from ‘cook me some eggs’ right?” That will haunt me forever. Interestingly, a lot of people think that I didn’t know what was happening, but that was actually about the 11th take. I obviously wasn’t a great actress because we had to do it so many times, but it ended up being pretty convincing.
My favourite NZ TV ad is… Togs, togs, undies. I think it always made you think about, when you were in your togs at Mission Bay with an ice cream, is it appropriate that I am wearing togs right now? Where’s the line?
My TV guilty pleasure is… Generally the time when I would watch the most satellite TV is when I’m traveling and I’m in a hotel room. It seems whenever I’m in a hotel and I flick the TV on, it always seems to be playing Botched. It’s quite interesting – I actually watched it last night.
My first time on television is… This is quite a big secret, but I was once in a KFC ad. In the ad we’re in a queue lining up for KFC, and a little boy pinches a girl’s bum, and then the girl turns around and thinks it’s the guy behind her because the boy is so short, and gives him a rude look. I wasn’t the main actress because I’m not good enough for that, but I was one of the people standing in the queue. You couldn’t even see my face in it.
Nadia Lim on MasterChef in 2011
My enduring memory of MasterChef is… That it was terrifying. So terrifying. I lost a lot of weight on the show, even though it was a cooking show. When we weren’t filming the actual challenges, we were living all together in this big mansion on the North Shore in Auckland, and we had the most amazing pantry filled with incredible ingredients and produce to practice with. So we were cooking and eating all the time, and yet I lost five kilos over the course of the 12 weeks from all the adrenaline and the stress. I reckon I’ve still got a bit of PTSD, because I was so scared of being on camera. But I was so determined to win that cookbook deal.
My favourite TV project from my own career is… The show I enjoyed creating the most was actually the one that we made during lockdown, called Nadia’s Comfort Kitchen. We were in our little bubble on the farm that we had just moved to. It was just me, my husband Carlos and our two boys [Lim has since had another son] and we made a show together with Carlos filming on his iPhone. It was such a surreal time – in the beginning of each episode I would suggest people have a picnic in their bubble, or a movie night, and it really captured this precious, surreal, historic moment in time. We feel so lucky as a family that we have that to look back on, it’s like having a live photo album, which is very special.
The TV show I wish I could be involved in is… I would love to hang out with Jeremy Clarkson on Clarkson’s Farm. Obviously, Jeremy’s a very, very different character to me, but we relate so much to it. When my husband and I watch it we’re like, “we did that mistake, we did that mistake”. I think it would just be so fun to go over there and sit down, compare notes, have a yarn and probably a whine about farming.
Nadia’s Farm Kitchen starts September 10 on Three and ThreeNow.