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Nadia Lim
 

Nadia Lim comes to Hagley

Marie Stribling —

Recently Hagley was fortunate to be offered the opportunity, through South City Paper Plus, to host a fundraising event involving the promotion of Nadia Lim’s new cookbook, “Let’s Eat”.

Nadia has gained fame in New Zealand as a celebrity chef, Master Chef winner, judge on Master Chef and My Food Rules, as well as founder of My Food Bag and as a healthy eating advocate and food writer.

The book launch was held in the Hagley College Cafe on 12 September, and was attended by more than 200 guests. Many guests took advantage of the opportunity to meet Nadia and to take that all important ‘selfie’ with her. Our own ‘master chef’, Marc Alexander, led the School of Cuisine students to prepare and serve food made from Nadia’s recipes. Marc was also supported by Cat Scott-Hewitt, our After 3 Cookery teacher. Nadia was effusive in her praise of the School of Cuisine team. “I’ve done quite a lot of these events before with food prepared by students, and the food tonight stood out as the best by far,” said Nadia.

Nadia entertained the audience with her stories, including her dreams as a 12 year old of being a famous chef and of marrying Jamie Oliver, a dream that was shattered when Jamie found himself a wife! Nadia also let the audience into some of the behind the scenes secrets about the Master Chef competition. She regaled us with stories of how she learnt to avoid the camera so that she could do some rather unorthodox ‘fixes’ to her food prior to presenting it to the judges.

The fundraiser was a great success for Hagley and raised funds which will be used to support cuisine programmes in the school as well as support student leadership at Hagley.