Where is annabel langbein from

New Zealand's second-biggest-selling book of was the global publishing phenomenon The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo , which sold 51, copies. That is no trivial difference, but nor is it an outlier when it comes to Langbein's recent books. Her string of successes have led the publishing industry to coin the term "the Annabel effect" for the noticeable upturn in the industry every year she publishes a book.

In a single week, during the lead-up to Christmas , The Free Range Cook sold more than 10, copies. To put that in context, Nadia Lim, who is widely considered Langbein's main local publishing rival, released a bestselling book in May called Easy Weeknight Meals , which sold copies across the entire year. Since , Langbein's books have all been reliable best-sellers, but The Free Range Cook helped define her for the modern age. It put the woman who had long been an integral part of the New Zealand food scene firmly at its centre.

Television is what has made Langbein famous but it is books that have made her rich. She is, famously, not a trained cook. She cooked for a few months in a newly opened restaurant in Gisborne once as a very young woman, but she ended up there almost by accident and with the heavy support of Elizabeth David's classic cookbook, Italian Food.

She didn't much like cooking in a restaurant though. She felt constrained by the hours and the repetition. A desire for freedom runs through her. She traces this desire back to a trip she took to San Francisco with her parents when she was And I think that was a very potent moment in time for me, when the world spun on a different axis. It's like music in a way - once you know a few songs, or basic recipes, you can riff on them with the ingredients you have to hand and play with them to make them suit your mood.

From 18, she spent two-and-a-half years living largely in the bush in the Ureweras, trapping possums and jumping from helicopters to catch live deer for money. And Mum had given me [legendary American chef] Julia Child's Mastering The Art Of French Cooking when I was about 14 and I would come out with whatever it was that I had hunted or gathered or fished, and then go to that book and make something incredibly extravagant.

I had this sense of almost like a physical need to cook. She moved to South America for a couple of years in her early 20s and ended up in a small coastal town in Brazil, where she cooked small, crunchy croissants in the afternoon, drawing a steady stream of people knocking on her door, wanting to buy them. It was a seminal moment, she says, when she realised that something that gave her pleasure could also support her lifestyle.

Returning home, she began work as a microwave oven demonstrator, then started a catering business for television and film shoots. She wrote an article for The Listener about her travels, and that led to her first regular food-writing gig, a fortnightly column in that magazine.

She started doing some consulting work. She was at a point where she knew that she wanted to build a career around food, but she didn't really know how, so she wrote to Julia Child, long before Child had been played in a major motion picture by Meryl Streep, asking for advice.

Child wrote back, suggesting she go to the conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals in Seattle, which Langbein did. The Australian Women's Weekly. Thirty seconds into interviewing Annabel Langbein, a very Annabel Langbein thing occurs. We are sitting in the lounge of her Auckland home, when her husband Ted Hewetson barrels through the door with two boxes of buffalo mozzarella and two of the cheesemakers themselves.

Annabel greets both with equal measures of enthusiasm — she really loves people, and she really loves cheese. She and Helen, from Clevedon Buffalo Co. This mirrors the exact conversation we've just been having, where Annabel is saying how surprised she has been to realise that the life stage she's now in happens to be the best one. It was a relatively recent realisation, she says, and it was borne out of the expectations that life post would be, well, the opposite.

But it is so not — it's the opposite. You have this incredible energy, and you can still feel sexy and fabulous… but there is a freedom that comes with it. Annabel believes that part of the reason they are so achievable now is because the pressure is finally off.

When you're young, you have a presence because you are young and everybody loves young people. As you get older, you realise nobody is looking at you — they're looking at your daughter! When you're younger… we don't think we're doing it for other people, but [subconsciously] we are. With tea and chocolate chip cookie in hand, Annabel is in an introspective mood — something she has found comes more easily as she's grown older.

You don't have any time because you're always going from this thing to this thing. Life is a rush of looking after a lot of people," she says. Family Annabel Langbein and her daughter Rose reveal the secrets behind their new cookbook Woman's Day.

For the past 30 years, Annabel's life has run at a relentless pace: raising two children with Ted while also building a cooking empire. Three television series, 27 books — the latest of which, Essential , included a whopping recipes. All that hard work has paid off; Annabel has been a household name for over two decades. Nobody else in my family suffered, because they were all loved and taken care of, but you'd work a hour-plus day and then come home, cook dinner, read the kids stories.

You're the person that suffers. And something is going to give. I got really burned out when the kids were little and [looking back] it's like… I actually didn't have to have done all that. I didn't need to work as hard. He's been incredibly nourishing of not just me, but of my ideas and what I want to achieve. I think that's really lucky — that's what you want in a partnership: that you can support each other to be your best selves.

Annabel laughs that neither she nor Ted were prepared for how good this stage of their relationship was going to be. We hang out a lot together and we also work together.

We're at our happiest down in Wanaka [their second home], in the sense that you're very connected to the land. He's out in the garden all day, I'm pottering around writing, cooking, gardening. It's a very simple rhythm and we don't get sick of each other's company, which is the surprising thing," she says.

Part of the joy of being such a recognisable face and name is that Annabel is often stopped by people wanting to talk about her recipes case in point, I can't help but tell her that half The Australian Women's Weekly team makes her Spiced Chickpeas with Spinach and Haloumi recipe once a week. When this happens, Annabel says she likes that it's not done in an adulating fan way but because people want to tell her how one of her recipes has slotted effortlessly into their lives.

Langbein self-published her first book of recipes , and has since built one of New Zealand's most successful publishing houses, Annabel Langbein Media. She has authored and self-published 25 cookbooks, which have been published in numerous languages and sold more than two million copies all around the world.

Her book The Free Range Cook was available in more than 70 countries and sold more than , copies. In she established the Culinary Institute of New Zealand, a specialist food marketing consultancy, and was responsible for marketing and media campaigns for New Zealand food manufacturers, retailers and exporters, as well as promoting New Zealand food offshore for Trade New Zealand.

For seven years she was a director of New Zealand gourmet cheese company Kapiti and for three years she was a judge for the International Association of Culinary Professionals' Julia Child Award for the best first cookbook. Her philanthropic work has included raising substantial sums for the National Heart Foundation of New Zealand, Autism New Zealand and other charity groups.

UK-based global content company FremantleMedia first noticed Langbein's presenting skills in , when she posted on YouTube a series of how-to cooking features that she had made to promote her book Eat Fresh. They approached her and offered to back her to produce a fully fledged TV series. She co-produced the series and worked with a seven-person TVNZ crew over a six-month filming schedule.

It was the first time she had fronted her own cooking show and series on television, but she has since co-produced two further seasons of the show. Langbein's books and TV series have won numerous national and international awards. Langbein was awarded an honorary Doctor of Commerce degree by Lincoln University in