The chef who fell in love with a piece of Tasman
It took “quite a few big life blows” for professional chef Alesha Bilbrough-Collins to get to where she is now: happily ensconced in rural Tasman.
Bilbrough-Collins, a cookbook author, caterer, retreat and workshop holder, and chef for hire, is based in the Upper Moutere with her husband John Collins.
She had been running a deli and restaurant in Christchurch when, in a series of unfortunate events, her husband suffered from concussion, his father suddenly died, and a new restaurant panned out.
“Stuff it,” the couple thought, packing up their lives, shutting down businesses, and hitting the road for three months while they thought about what they wanted to do next. When Covid hit, Bilbrough-Collins’ husband’s family was in Australia, and they were unable to travel across the ditch.
“We sort of realised, if something like this happens again, we want to be as close to family as possible,” said BilbroughCollins, whose family live in Ngātīmoti.
“Luckily everything fell into place, with my husband finding work and finding this ridiculously awesome property and here we are.”
There, the self-described “cock-less chef and environmental fairy” set herself up with a commercial kitchen, out of which she creates a BearLion Foods menu once a month. Following a wholefood, no-waste philosophy, customers preorder and bring their own containers. The food is local, wholefood, seasonal and organic, with “big, bold flavours”, such as “salads that are not salady, they’re a meal in itself”.
Bilbrough-Collins said locals appreciate that they can stock up their freezers with convenient food that’s “not fish and chips”. She also does a different take on weddings, trying to “make people realise that they don’t have to spend so much money on one day”, serving food in big recyclable cardboard containers that their mates can pick up or the chef herself can drop off. Since they have relocated, John has made a full recovery. Down in Christchurch, he’d been working full-time as a project manager in the construction industry, but also helping his wife with the markets, getting up at 4am. It proved to be too much. “He just stood up, just blacked out and fell down ... He wasn’t John. He wasn’t my husband anymore, there was just like this grey mass.” In the following months, John was in intense pain, so much so he felt like his head was in a vice and his eyes were going to pop, a pain that no pill could help.
“Bringing John back” involved meditation, reiki, CBD oil and learning about neural pathways. In his new home, life is simpler without the stress of owning a restaurant, where he’d have to pitch in to wash dishes at a moment’s notice because someone didn’t show up to their shift.
The couple’s challenges in Upper Moutere are now of a different ilk: revamping the gardens to grow produce, as the time and petrol costs of procuring veges have proven tricky. “I’ve got the land here so I might as well do it myself,” Bilbrough-Collins says, adding that she just had to get her soil “epic” first.
As to her new, rural life, she raves about Upper Moutere, where you can shout out to your neighbours and lend and be lent a hand in turn. “It’s a much better lifestyle,” she says. “You’re actually living.’’
Alesha Bilbrough-Collins features in an episode of Shepherdess – a six-part free-toair series celebrating three women living in a different part of rural Aotearoa every episode, which debuted on Sky Open on October 22.