RecipeTin Eats founder Nagi Maehashi joins STM team

Nagi Maehashi, founder of RecipeTin Eats, the globally popular food blog she established back in 2014, has signed on to The Sunday Times to provide a delicious recipe for STM readers each week.

The passionate home cook has amassed legions of fans through her easy-to-follow, tasty online recipes, which she will now be sharing each week in an exclusive column.

The news comes off the back of publisher Pan Macmillan Australia’s announcement that Maehashi’s first cookbook, Dinner, released in mid-October, has broken sales records across the board.

The book, which features more than 150 recipes over 300 pages, is the culmination of a year of hard work for the author, who crafted, photographed and tested each recipe — she famously made her ‘perfect vanilla cake’ 89 times before agreeing it was good enough to make it into her book.

According to Nielsen BookData, Maehashi’s RecipeTin Eats: Dinner is the highest-selling title from a debut Australian author in its first week of release. It is also the highest-selling print title by volume in the Australian Book Market for the week ending October 15.

Maehashi, a former finance executive, loved her corporate career but started RecipeTin Eats because she “wanted to do something of my own”.

It was a steep learning curve for the home cook who had never picked up a camera, but her hard work paid dividends — last year, the website had 335 million page views and Maehashi has amassed 4.5 million followers on social media.

Writing Dinner was another challenge, but Maehashi threw herself into it with gusto.

“I had never done a printed cookbook before — I didn’t know what was going to be in it, and what would feel like a natural fit to be printed,” she told STM.

“So (when) I started out, I spent about two or three weeks just cooking non-stop, just trying to come up with ideas and see what was flowing.

“I landed very much on what my bread and butter is — everyday, quick-and-easy food which is a step above the average.”

Also in STM today, columnist Brittany Bown opens up about her engagement to West Coast Eagles ruckman Nic Naitanui and the birth of their son, Ezekiel Duke. She reveals that Naitanui’s proposal during a holiday to Broome left her in “shock”.

“While we were posing for a photo in front of the beautiful sunset Nic surprised everyone, including myself, by getting down on one knee and asking me to marry him,” she writes in a special column today.

Bown said Ezekiel was, so far, a content baby who rarely cried and Nic was “a beautiful and very hands-on father”.

While she had hoped for a natural and quick labour, his birth was “a great lesson in being flexible and accepting the reality of the moment,” she said.