Stephanie Alexander relives her Under the Tuscan Sun moment

The acclaimed cook, restaurateur and writer has found beauty as far afield as Egypt and as close to home as… home.

1997 | Italy TUSCANY

After a fabulous holiday in Umbria with our nearest and dearest, [fellow cook] Maggie Beer and I dreamed up a scheme to come back to Italy with a small group and give classes. We found a huge but slightly tired villa south of Siena in Tuscany, took a cook and an Italian-speaking waiter from my Melbourne restaurant, Stephanie’s, and a costumemaker friend with a very arty eye and gave the place a makeover. We were there for two months with three different groups. Each morning, we’d go to the market, bring the produce back to the house, talk about it and our students would taste things that, in most cases, they had not tasted before. We gave ourselves one-and-a-half days between the end of one school and the start of another and, in that time, we had to wash the sheets and tea towels, scrub the showers, clean the refrigerator... It was just stupid but we learnt a lot, made great friends and wrote a book [Tuscan Cookbook] that was a great success.

2014 | Australia

MELBOURNE

I have a history of going for a walk or to the shops and accidentally buying a house; I’ve done it twice now. This one was the most dramatic and scary. I had a real estate brochure in the letterbox and ended up buying an apartment in Abbotsford off the plan.

It was a bit of a gut thing; you make this amazing decision then think, “What have I done?” I’d had my Victorian house in Hawthorn for 22 years, with vegetables growing in the backyard. I felt sick about it for months but I’ve been living here for four-and-a-bit years now and the view over the river gives me pleasure every single day. One lot of windows faces east so I see the sun rising and the other lot faces west so I see the last light through the trees. I’ve given up growing vegetables. Because I’m on the banks of the Yarra, with gum trees and acacia trees, my garden is more about waving grasses and grevilleas, kookaburras, wattlebirds and magpies. It’s a lovely place to live. I’m very happy.

2018 | Egypt CAIRO

Two mates from my uni days and I joined a small group tour of Jordan and Egypt. I had never grasped how colourful and vivid the hieroglyphs in Egypt are; how accurate and beautiful the depictions of wading birds and little songbirds. The feathers on the ducks were green. There were fish and snakes and papyrus growing on the banks of the Nile. It’s hard to describe one’s response to something like that; I didn’t know they were going to be that poetic and lively. The whole society was spread out for you. There were servants preparing food for the queen, battles being fought, prisoners with ropes around their necks, stories about the gods and what they believe – it was all there on the walls. Near the end of the trip, we saw the Tutankhamen room in the Egyptian Museum and it was just mind-blowing; you’ve never seen so much gold in your life.