EVERYDAY RECIPES
We chat to Lisa Clark, food stylist and author of the cookbook, Lisa Clark Everyday.
At home with food stylist Lisa Clark, PLUS a few recipes from her cookbook, Lisa Clark Everyday
Step into Lisa Clark’s home and you enter a tranquil haven that is somehow the perfect mix of minimalist Scandi-chic and warm hygge – a bit like Lisa herself, über-stylish but warm, open and unpretentious. ‘That,’ she says happily, when I admire a print on her wall, ‘I picked up at Mr Price down the road. I love decorating on a budget and it helps that I have an eye for design.’
As a sought-after food stylist, that eye for design has been crucial, but it wasn’t until she was 25 that she first found her passion.
‘I fell into it by accident,’ she says. She was a trained chef and had left her job as a product developer at Woolworths because she ‘just couldn’t do it any more’. Luckily, the job had involved going on ad shoots, so when her friend and photographer Nigel Deary needed a stylist to fill in for a session, he called her.
‘I did it, and I loved it! It was like a drug. I literally threw myself into it, heart, body and soul – like anyone with ADHD would.’
Candid about her own as well as her daugh--
ters’ struggles with ADHD (she has 12-year-old twins, Maia and Aerin), Lisa is passionate about encouraging parents of children with ADHD to help their children find their hidden talent.
‘If you’d asked any of my teachers, they would have billed me as the one least likely to succeed. I was rebellious, disgusting [she once used an epilator on her legs in class] – but that was because I hadn’t found what it was I wanted to do! And there was no real career guidance back then. So I always tell my children: “Find your passion; something you love doing, and then just do that.” Look at me – I’ve made a 20-year career of it!’ Lisa attributes her tenacity to her dad’s parenting. Her mom Gail and sister Fiona tragically died in a car crash when she was just 12. ‘My dad was never a helicopter parent,’ she says. ‘He kind of let us girls get on with things. When I look at my children now, I think: “How did I manage without my mom?! How did I tie my hair? How did I make my sandwiches?” But I did it all. ‘We are five children – my two sisters, Amy and Fay, and our two half-sisters, Sarah and Michelle, from my dad’s second marriage. When I think about it now, he had it right. He was always there for us. He adores his children but he was never fussed about our schoolwork and getting things done on time. I guess when you’ve had that great a tragedy you focus on the important things.’ This approach is one she adopts with her kids too. ‘I teach my kids what I like to call soft skills – to be kind, and confident; to be able to pick up a phone and talk to people.’
Those skills have been useful in her own career, where teamwork is crucial. ‘You work with clients and you have to sparkle. When you’ve spent hours styling the shoot and they don’t like something, you have to work with them.’
She comes from an advertising background, so she defaults to perfection when styling, says Lisa. But she’s indulged her rustic side in Lisa Clark Everyday, which she says is how her family eats at home.
‘I used to feed my children expensive prepared foods, until they asked me if I could make lasagne. “Of course I can – I’m a chef!” I said. It was then that I thought I should make more of an effort.’
Lisa Clark Everyday is for the working mom who wants to feed her kids healthy food but who doesn’t have the time to cook from scratch every day, she says. So the book provides recipes for the bases of about four different dishes that you can freeze and build your meal around. It’s ingenious, and she only did it, she says, ‘because it’s a legacy I can leave for my kids’.
Her children, she says, have been her biggest lesson. ‘Being a mother wasn’t an easy ride for me, what with me being quite A-Type and wanting everything perfect. I had to adjust my thinking, which has been the best lesson for me ever… And I feel like now I’ve got a handle on it.’