Feel the force:

Peta Mathias has a taste for television.

Peta Mathias has the sort of life many people can only fantasise about. An accomplished writer, singer, chef and broadcaster, she spends half of the year in the south of France and the remainder in New Zealand.

That is when she’s not guiding overseas culinary tours in places such as Morocco or India.

“I don’t have winters,” Peta says. “I just chase the sun.”

Peta’s European base is the mediaeval town of Uzes where she hosts cooking workshops. Having lived in France before, where she ran her own restaurant, she has an affinity with the country and speaks fluent French.

When she spoke to TV Guide, Peta, who shuns takeaways and refuses to wear black clothing, had been busy promoting her latest book, Never Put All Your Eggs In One Bastard. She describes it as, “A memoir coupled with the story of building a house in the south of France.” The flame-haired foodie, who was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2012, is an author whose previous titles include Can We Help It If We’re Fabulous? and Just In Time To Be Too Late. Next month she is presenting a TV series under the banner Food For Thought where she introduces a food documentary each Wednesday evening on the Rialto channel. TV presenting is something Peta, who fronted Taste New Zealand, Taste Takes Off and A Taste Of Home, hopes to do more of. “I miss television a lot,” she says. “I’m still in negotiations at the

“I don’t think I would have been a good mother. I would have been frustrated and I would have wanted to be somewhere else.” – Peta Mathias

moment to film some more of my culinary tours. I started filming them and I want to continue. It’s just really hard to get funding.”

One of six children, Peta married (for visa purposes) a French gay man, who died from an illness a few years later.

She never remarried and decided not to have children.

“People said to me, ‘You’ll regret it when you’re older that you didn’t have children’ but I don’t,” she says.

“I don’t think I would have been a good mother. I would have been frustrated and I would have wanted to be somewhere else. I would have felt locked in and tied down and my

children would have suffered, but instead I chose my own path and it hasn’t been easy but it has been rewarding in the end.”

Last year, Peta mourned the death of her 91-year-old father in May and then six months later her mother died at the age of 96.

“My father died a few days before my Morocco tour and I had to do that tour,” she says. “You just have to keep going no matter what.”

Not surprisingly Peta, who is in her mid-60s, has no plans to retire.

“I think retirement is for birds,” says Peta. “I would really miss my life because it keeps my brain active.”