Nadia Lim needs little introduction. A few years ago, Nadia and her husband Carlos Bagrie and their two (now three) boys took over Royalburn Station near Arrowtown and embarked on what Nadia acknowledges has been the hardest challenge yet – becoming farmers. On 1200 acres, they grow a plethora of produce and raise bees, chickens and lamb. Nadia’s Farm Kitchen is the companion cookbook to the TV series of the same name, which focusses on all the delicious food that Nadia makes from the ingredients they grow, hunt, forage and raise at Royalburn. As she makes clear in the thoughtful essays dispersed throughout, these recipes are a reflection of more than those ingredients, but also the hard work that goes into producing them. The recipes are, of course, delicious, inviting, accessible and nutritious – all the things we’d expect from a Nadia cookbook – with sections for each of the four seasons. Even as Nadia explains how hard farming is, it can’t help but look idyllic in many of the shots and there’s cute chicks and lambs to aww over. But there’s reality here too – a photo of dead rabbits precedes the recipe for Bunny Nuggets. There’s a deeper learning in this book, and such heartfelt respect for the undertaking of farming that you can’t help but pause to take a look at your fridge and pantry quite differently as you pull the ingredients to make one of the recipes. As Nadia says in her introduction: “As the saying goes, you might need a lawyer or a doctor once a year, but every day, three times a day, you need a farmer.”  SÍANA CLIFFORD