Never Put All Your Eggs in One Bastard: A Memoir

Funny, passionate, outrageous and honest, this is a memoir about travel, house renovations, food, music, men and change.

‘I’ve escaped more houses than I’ve said Hail Marys.’

Peta Mathias has been making major moves since leaving home to train as a nurse, before living in Canada, London and later France, where she set up her own restaurant. Although she returned to New Zealand, writing food books and making television series, she continued to yoyo back to Europe and started culinary tours to Spain, Italy, Morocco, India, Vietnam, and the recurring attraction: France.

In this ‘memoir of sorts’, Peta looks back at the patterns of her life while she embarks on the next big stage in it: selling her beloved cottage in Auckland to buy a dilapidated old house in Uzès in the south of France and transforming the old wreck into a stylish home and cooking school. This new domesticity is set against her nomadic instincts and past history of running away from all conventional expectations of settling down. Spiced with recipes, the thrills and tribulations of reinventing yourself and her trademark humour, this book is really about never putting all your eggs in one bastard.