Alice Zaslavsky, "I'm very much in full colour, surround sound. That's me, I'm like the IMAX of cookbooks.”

The James Beard nominated cookbook author and broadcaster on touring with Ottolenghi, life lessons, and the books she wants to write.

This interview has been in the offing for an age. When I first thought about Between Meals, Alice came to mind as someone I’d love to feature. She’s always engaging, insightful and has become something of a veggie go-to for me, often popping up in pieces I’ve written for The Guardian, where she now has a regular column.

Alice being Alice, in the space of doing this interview and hitting publish she’s been nominated for a prestigious James Beard Media Award in the States, for In Praise of Veg, a book that’s had a truly global reach.

While we did this interview over the phone – Alice being whisked across Melbourne having just completed some prerecords for her Saturday Breakfast show on ABC Melbourne, and me sat in a Busselton carpark with a barking dog – we last caught up face to face in London when Hurricane Alice tore through Borough Market.

We get into that briefly, as well as her approach to publishing, a view to the future and the books she’d like to write, how she manages a constant swirl of projects and media commitments, and how being an educator has informed her work. There’s reflection on her formative MasterChef experience, and how over more than a decade she’s shaped her career, including her time as a stagiaire at Attica (side note: she was wearing an Attica T-Shirt, Ben Shewry looking a little like Morrissey when we caught up). For good measure there’s also what she learnt from her mate, Yotam Ottolenghi.

This interview is a bit of a beast. Wrangled down to just over 3500-words from thousands more. Much of it is behind the paywall. Remember there is a 7-day trial, and by becoming a paid subscriber (annual is cheaper) you’re supporting more of the same, and much more. You can even gift subscriptions.

We dive straight into the burning question of what’s new, and what’s next. Alice has just released The Little Box of Veg which she describes as a companion to the book, In Praise of Veg.  It’s a synthesis of the almost 500-pages of that hugely popular tome, and focused squarely on cutting down on food waste.  It’s hard to keep up, The Joy of Better Cooking having also been released to critical and commercial acclaim. ”Oh I’ve started selling merch as well,” she says. “Fridge magnets!“

Alice confirms that a contract has been inked for her next book, followed by a manic laugh, which is perhaps more about the thought that she has to write it amidst her other commitments, than the act of signing. “The deadline's actually been pushed out, blissfully extended,” she says. “So, I've got some breathing room, which is nice.”

Tight lipped as to the actual ins and outs of the concept, as you’d expect, she does say that “nothing's created in a vacuum.” Her focus is always “the value add,” in that her publishing success has been about finding a problem and helping to solve it. “So, it's a continuation of that,” she says. “But also, it's just stuff I like to cook and eat. That's always going to be veg forward, and it'll feel like an Alice book, because I wrote it.”

With three books now to her name Alice says that the more she writes the more she “understands the space. I am clear on what my points of difference are, what my special sauce is. I'm very much in full colour, surround sound. That's me, I'm like the IMAX of cookbooks.”

I offer that the last two titles, specifically, give a real sense of personality. “That's because the first one [Alice's Food A to Z, a kid friendly book] I had a lot less understanding of how much I can control those elements,” she says. “I was just so green, and I was like, what do I know? But now, actually, I do know because this needs to feel like an extension of me and who I am because that's what people buy into.” A book that feels homogenized (which let’s face it many do), she says, gives no reason for someone to choose that book over another. “It needs a clear point of difference, a USP.”

“One of the things that's interesting, though, is that because I had that experience on my first book, when the second contract came around, I was talking to Jane Morrow [now publishing director at Murdoch Books] about what I needed. I said I want to have final sign off. And she was like, listen, you know, I understand why you're saying that, but it's just going to delay the whole process if we have to check and balance everything against you every time. So, she was really respectful in the way that she reassured me that actually, we are going to make sure that we get this right by you because it's important to us as well. I suppose it was that I learnt that you don't have to micromanage it.”

It's an experience that has clearly guided Alice’s approach across her career, having confidence in others. “My best work and my best experiences in my life in terms of creative collaborations have been in finding the right people whose taste level I trust and who are passionate about what they do, and then trusting them to do their job and not splitting hairs on stuff that's not my expertise,” she says. “I don't need to tell them how to suck eggs.”