Annabel Langbein

Annabel Langbein is a New Zealand celebrity cook, food writer and publisher. She has published 25 cookbooks and fronted three seasons of her TV series, Annabel Langbein The Free Range Cook, which launched on the TV One network in New Zealand and has since screened in more than 90 countries, including on the PBS network in the USA.

It’s Annabel’s mission to get people into the kitchen to create simple, healthy and delicious meals using fresh seasonal ingredients. Her lighthearted, down-to-earth approach, no-fail recipes and clever kitchen tips have earned her a passionate international following. A foundation member of the Sustainability Council of New Zealand, Annabel is uniquely qualified as a flag-bearer for the international sustainability movement, having spent her early life living off the land, cooking over an open fire, trapping possums (a major pest in New Zealand) and crayfish, and jumping out of helicopters to recover live deer.

She is the daughter of Fred and Anne Langbein and is married to Ted Hewetson, with whom she has two children, Sean and Rose. Her father worked in a city office but was a keen vegetable gardener and beekeeper, while her mother was a cook and home science university graduate. She credits her mother as the inspiration for her cooking. Annabel first met husband Ted while working as a possum trapper on his family's farm on the East Cape of New Zealand. By chance she later shared a flat with her future sister-in-law Debbie, who helped orchestrate their relationship. She claims to have attracted Ted with the help of a bacon and egg pie. He proposed three times before she finally said yes and they married in Wellington.

As a teenager in the 1970s, Annabel says she was a fully-fledged hippie and feminist, railed against domesticity, consumerism and the urban world in general, and left home and school at the age of 16. Her mother took her to Europe in the hope of showing her the 'real world' but on her return she moved up the Whanganui River with some friends to enjoy an alternative lifestyle growing vegetables, cooking over a fire and living off the land. For several years she hunted and fished for much of her own food, and it was during this time that she honed her cooking skills through endless experimentation.

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