IT IS A PRIVILEGE to witness someone transform their life. When he’s your spouse and you watch him take on his life’s work as a result of the change, it’s awe-inspiring.
When I first met Richard Moon in the very late 1990s, he was flipping burgers at a Katoomba fundraising event. The chef and co-manager of a popular local eatery at the time, we moved in different circles.
By the time our relationship started a few years later, Richard had become one of a community of hospitality workers who powered the renowned cuisine of the Blue Mountains during the boom of tourism that revived the region in the 1990s and 2000s.
More comfortable with his job title being ‘cook’, never ‘chef’, he was working at a Thai restaurant on Leura Mall. Within months, he and his collaborator had started a new business in the same building.
A hallmark of our 20-year marriage has been working together, a matter of doing what’s needed at the time. So I joined the crew who helped renovate, and put my design skills into creating the business’s branding, before The Red Door Café opened its fire-engine scarlet entranceway in 2006.
Working seven days a week while renovating our first home and garden in north Leura took a swift toll on Richard. It was therefore an easy decision for him to apply for a position as sous chef-trainer at the Blue Mountains International Hotel Management School in 2007. After years in commercial kitchens, the thought of stepping into a vocational training environment threw him a little, but Richard is a natural teacher (from a family of educators), and the new role gave him the opportunity to fall in love with food all over again through sharing his skills.
It was during this period that Richard and I began another business collaboration, when I got my first editing job for Blue Mountains Life, the region’s lifestyle magazine. We decided to visit food producers, from beef, oyster and truffle farmers to chocolatiers and orchardists, in order to impart the message of going to source wherever possible.
For a pair of farmer’s sons, this was a taste of our origins.
I’ll never forget the love and admiration shown to Richard from students on his final day at the hotel school. He’d never been an aloof teacher in an office somewhere, he’d worked in the trenches alongside these young people from across the world, and they were thankful for the camaraderie and the inspiration. Richard is still in touch with many of them.
In 2012, not long after moving to Queensland, Richard and I were dining at a winery at Mount Cotton when I asked what he really wanted to do if it wasn’t cooking. He’d struggled to get a chef’s position in his home state, and his courageous answer was that he was keen to try jewellery making as a career.
Not working in a high-street eatery had given him a few years of headspace to pick up a bit of silver-working technique at Sondi’s Studio in Wentworth Falls. I’d seen from his experimentation that he had a natural ability.
He set up a small jewellery workshop in our outer Brisbane home and has rarely looked back, until the process of putting this book together.
Doing so, we were amazed at the arc of our collaborative creative life, the ingredients and method that went into it.
It delights me that Richard often uses chef’s tools for silver-working: his oyster shucker is still employed at his workbench, and he relies on a brûlée torch for soldering during his regular mobile jewellery workshops.
His jam-making spoon has quite a history. At a business contents sale in the early 2000s, when Bodds Café Katoomba was closing, I snapped up a well-loved wooden spoon which the vendor told me had been used by the former chef/owner. As we moved into our first home, we realised Richard had inherited that very spoon in 1996 – ends burnt, bowl well-worn, and stained orange from years of being used with spices – when he and his former Bodds colleagues took over the premises of an Indian restaurant. This beloved implement has been in our lives for three decades and is still used for jam making, the perfect symbol for this book.
Moon on a Spoon is part-memoir, part-cookbook, a means of explaining how Richard adapted to changes in cooking styles and shifts in the hospitality industry. It’s also an account of how to alter the trajectory of a life by taking new pathways and giving dreams cooking time.
An extract from Moon on a Spoon: Recipes from a creative life, out now from High Country Books.
Michael Burge Media 