“Writing Our Own Cookbook was a Dream Come True” – Interview with Seline and Leandri van der Wat

by Amanda on Nov 19th, 2015

Seline and Leandri van der Wat recently chatted to Se7en about their new cookbook, TWO.

The sisters rose to fame on MasterChef South Africa in 2013, and as Se7en writes “as a country we simply fell in love with them”.

More about TWO

Se7en tried out eight of the recipes in the book, pronouncing the “wow factor” to be high in all of them.

In the interview, Seline and Leandri recommend their favourite ingredients and reveal the kitchen equipment they could not do without.

They also explain how writing the book worked:

Writing a cookbook is about as far as you could get from your usual day to day work, what was the best part about putting it all together for you?

Seline: Look, we’ve wanted a cookbook since we were little girls. Our mother used to buy us children’s cookbooks before we could even read and we both have a cookbook collection that is treasured (although varied due to our different personalities!). So writing our own was a dream come true, especially with a publisher as huge as Penguin Random House! It was so much fun to develop the concept behind the book and then to come up with all of the recipes – and working along somebody as brilliant as Leandri just made it that much more entertaining.

Leandri: It was a creative release – I needed to work on my Masters dissertation at the time of our manuscript deadline but I found working on our book a lot more captivating and satisfying! My best moment of the process was during our photography with Sean Calitz and Brita du Plessis – they are so incredible. We made the cumin steak with a coffee sauce and the leftovers we left for the MD of Penguin Random House, Steve Connolly, and the next day he sent a message to us to let us know it was the best sauce he had ever eaten! That was an incredible compliment!