I was recently asked a whole bunch of questions about my childhood, my family, how Simple Home Edit started and what life looked like before any of this existed. I loved answering them because, although you probably know what I cooked for dinner last Tuesday 😂, there are lots of things about me and how I ended up here that I’ve never really shared properly.
So I thought I’d put them all in one place. Consider this the slightly longer introduction we probably should have had years ago.
So many. My mum has always been an incredible cook and some of my earliest memories are standing in the kitchen watching her make chicken schnitzel or her famous potato dumplings. She’d let me shape my own little dumplings, and I’d proudly throw my wonky creations into the pot.
We grew up around food. There was always something being cooked, pickled, braised or baked. I always joke that we regularly had three types of cabbage on the table because apparently one cabbage dish wasn’t enough – sauerkraut, braised cabbage and cabbage salad. 😂
We didn’t really eat out. That just wasn’t part of our life. I sometimes say we “didn’t have a lot” growing up, but that isn’t really the right way to describe it. We actually had an enormous amount. We had two parents who worked unbelievably hard to give us a home, an education and beautiful food on the table.
There wasn’t endless money coming in and my parents had built what they had from nothing, so Mum was incredibly resourceful. Yet somehow our table always felt abundant. Looking back, I realise we didn’t need to eat out anyway. We were already eating at the best restaurant in the neighbourhood: Mum’s kitchen.
If people came over, she’d make an enormous spread – a beautiful roast, her dumplings, lots of different salads and usually her walnut custard cake, which is layers of buttery walnut sponge with chocolate custard. She was incredibly generous in the way she hosted people, even at times when being generous probably wasn’t particularly easy.
I think that’s where so much of what I do now comes from. Food was never just food. It was how you looked after people.
I have one brother, Roman, who is 12 years older than me. Our family story is quite an interesting one. Mum and Dad are Croatian and lived in Germany before moving to Australia. Roman was born in Germany and was 8 when they moved here.
He found the move really difficult. Everything was different – the language, the culture, even the clothes. Apparently in Germany it was very cool to sew little patches onto your jeans using scraps of fabric and love hearts. That definitely did not go down quite as well in Australia. 😂
Roman had always desperately wanted a little brother or sister. After they moved to Australia, Mum unexpectedly became pregnant with me at 40 after years of waiting. Dad was nearly 45. So naturally I’ve always interpreted this story as evidence that I was the greatest thing that ever happened to our family. 😂 Roman might tell it differently.
The truth is that he has been one of the greatest blessings in my life. With such a big age gap, Roman was always more than just my brother. He looked after me, protected me and stepped in whenever Mum and Dad needed help, particularly because English was their second language. He started working young and, as soon as he could afford to, he bought Mum and Dad their first colour television. I still remember what a huge moment that was in our family.
He was always the person who swooped in when something needed to be sorted out. And that continued when I became a teenager. I remember going through my first proper heartbreak and literally sleeping on the floor of his bedroom while he and his new wife were in bed. Now I think, that poor newly married couple with a devastated teenage girl sleeping on their bedroom floor! 🫠
But that’s who Roman was to me. There was never any question whether there was room for me. He’s still one of my biggest supporters. He’s incredibly loyal and loving and cares deeply about his family and the people around him.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised just how fortunate I’ve been to grow up with really beautiful male role models. Between Dad and Roman, I always knew what it looked like for men to be loving, dependable and completely devoted to their families.
And now I have my husband, Heath, too.
The fact that Roman loves Heath like a brother and Dad loves him like a son is incredibly special to me.
The food I grew up with was very much the hearty, continental side of Croatian cooking.
There were braised meats, potato dumplings, sarma (stuffed cabbage rolls), stuffed capsicums (bell peppers), sauerkraut and an extraordinary quantity of cabbage. There was also a stew for absolutely everything. Bean stew. Barley stew. Mushroom stew. Leek stew. If an ingredient existed, Mum could probably turn it into a stew. 😂
She also cooked loads of vegetables – braised, grilled, marinated or turned into salads. Bean salads, cabbage salads, beautiful cooked vegetables – there was always something on the table.
The first time I travelled to Croatia, I actually went to the coast and remember being completely confused by all the seafood. I was looking around thinking, Where are the dumplings? Where is all the meat? WHERE IS THE CABBAGE?
It was probably the first time I properly understood just how regional Croatian food is.
I was born in Australia but, until I met Heath when I was 20, my family had never even eaten a curry. Heath’s dad is Irish and his mum was born in Singapore, so the food he grew up eating was completely different from mine – beautiful curries, chicken adobo, Hainanese-style chicken and lots of Malaysian and Southeast Asian flavours. I remember eating his family’s chicken and lamb curries for the first time and thinking they were extraordinary.
Then Heath started cooking those foods for my parents. Mum’s birthday is Boxing Day and it became a tradition for Heath to make one of his curries for her birthday. I think that’s such a beautiful thing about different cultures coming together.
You have this Croatian family and this Singaporean-influenced family and suddenly everybody’s hero dishes start belonging to everybody. I’ve always loved food from different cultures, and now I get to connect with people cooking my recipes all over the world.
I find that incredible.
Growing up, my favourites were absolutely the things Mum cooked. Pork belly with braised cabbage and dumplings would be right up there, along with her cabbage rolls and stuffed capsicums filled with minced (ground) meat, rice and smoked meat or bacon. They are still some of my favourite things to eat now.
And weirdly, I don’t cook many of them myself because when someone else has already perfected something, sometimes it’s better to know your place. 😂 Mum still makes them better than I ever could.
These days, I think there are really two categories of cooking in my life:
The cooking I have to do and the cooking I want to do.
Weekend Nicole wants to put on some music and make a beautiful roast, pork belly with cabbage and potato gratin or a curry with all the little trimmings. Tuesday-night Nicole has approximately 30 minutes and would really prefer not to destroy the kitchen.
For weeknights, I love things like my quick chicken curry, chicken rissoles and Mum’s Chicken, from my new book Simple Weeknights. The chicken rissoles are particularly useful because the kids love them, and any parent who discovers a meal everybody eats knows you don’t simply make it once … you immediately place it into permanent rotation. 😂
Sitting down together. Growing up, our dining table was always clear and there was always somewhere for us to come together at the end of the day.
I’ve carried that into our own family.
I don’t think dinner has to be elaborate and I don’t think “family dinner” necessarily means parents sitting around a table with children either. It might be you and your partner. Your housemate. Your mum. Or just you.
For me, it’s about creating a little point in the day where you stop.
I spend so much time talking about making dinner faster and easier, but the whole reason I care about doing that is so there’s actually some energy left to enjoy eating it.
And then, of course, there’s the other sacred family tradition: Never throw away perfectly good leftovers. 😂
We met at university when we were 20.
I’m 41 now and turn 42 in November, so I’ve basically spent half my life with this man, which seems completely impossible.
He was studying business management and I was incredibly shy around him. Which is particularly funny if you’ve met me now because Heath probably spends most of his life wondering where that quiet woman went. 😂 I thought he was incredibly clever and funny, but I could barely bring myself to talk to him.
Then I invited him to my extremely “elegant and sophisticated” 21st birthday party – which involved plenty of ready-made drinks, potato chips and the kind of food choices that would make current-day me raise an eyebrow. Nothing says “future cookbook author and wholesome family dinner lady” quite like it. I finally plucked up the courage to properly speak to Heath that night and from there we were basically inseparable. We’ve really grown up together.
My son is 11 and my daughter is 10, and they’ve been in the kitchen with me since they were old enough to sit in a high chair. They’d sit there and watch me cook. Then they graduated to stirring, pouring and creating huge amounts of mess.
Now there are meals they can almost make from start to finish themselves, with a bit of guidance around knives and the stove.
They’re also completely different eaters, which I think is important to say because sometimes people assume that because I develop recipes, my children must politely eat everything I put in front of them.
They absolutely do not. 😂
They have very different tastes and very strong opinions. They’re genuinely my biggest fans and harshest critics. But they love lots of different cuisines, they’re interested in food and I love watching their confidence in the kitchen grow. More than anything, I want them to eventually leave home knowing how to feed themselves well.
I studied hospitality at university and then spent around 8 years working in travel. I started as a travel agent, although “booking holidays” probably undersells what the role actually became. It was very sales-focused and I moved into management within my first year. I eventually bought into two stores and later moved into a head-office role where I looked after a region and worked closely with different teams. It was a big job and it pushed me outside my comfort zone constantly.
I was naturally quite introverted, yet suddenly I was managing people, speaking at conferences, running seminars and dealing with customers every day.
One of the greatest parts of the job was the travel. I was exposed to so many different countries, cultures and foods, and that only deepened something I’d already loved since childhood. I was always interested in what people ate, where they ate it and what dishes were special to that place.
When I had my children, I knew I didn’t want to return to that particular career. It wasn’t going to give me the balance I wanted and, at that stage of my life, I really wanted to put my time and energy into being their mum. Looking back, those years gave me a huge amount of life experience and confidence. I certainly didn’t leave travel thinking I’d one day be sharing dinner recipes with millions of people online. There was definitely no master plan. 😂
Necessity!
Heath and I both grew up around really good food. I had Mum’s European cooking and Heath grew up with much more of an Asian influence, so we both loved eating. But when we first met, we were working full-time, saving furiously for our first home and working long hours.
Cooking wasn’t particularly high on the priority list. We ate out a lot and were also very enthusiastic recipients of leftovers from our families.
Then we had children, acquired a very juicy mortgage and suddenly eating out all the time wasn’t an option. Heath had started his own business, I was home with two little kids and I remember thinking, I need to work this out.
I didn’t want eating at home to feel like the disappointing alternative to going out. I wanted us to still eat food we were excited about – I just needed to work out how to do that affordably and around everything else happening in our lives. That’s when I became obsessed with meal planning.
I researched recipes, watched cooking shows and just started cooking constantly. Jamie Oliver was a huge inspiration for me at the time. Watching somebody cook so instinctively and enthusiastically gave me the confidence to loosen up and try things myself. Eventually I stopped looking at home cooking as this enormous daily task and started creating systems around it.
That changed everything.
At the end of 2019, completely anonymously.
I remember having six followers at one point and I’m fairly certain two or three of them were bots, so things were going exceptionally well. 😂 Really, I started it because I was lonely.
I was home with two young kids and most of my friends weren’t at that stage of life yet.
Parenting small children can be wonderful, but it can also be incredibly repetitive and isolating. You can spend an entire day doing things for everybody else and reach the end of it wondering what you actually achieved.
I wanted somewhere to connect with other women who were living a similar life. At the time I’d become really interested in decluttering, buying less and meal planning.
Those things all connected for me.
I realised that the less clutter I had in the kitchen and the more intentionally I shopped, the easier it was to feed my family without feeling completely overwhelmed. So I started sharing what was working for me.
Then whenever I shared food – particularly dinners or things I made when we entertained – people started asking for recipes. Eventually Heath built me a website so I had somewhere to put them all. Neither of us could possibly have imagined what that website was going to become.
I think I probably put my name to Simple Home Edit within the first 6 months. Initially, it was almost this little thing that belonged just to me.
There was definitely some fear around people in my real life knowing I was doing it. It’s that feeling of, What are people going to think? Hiding behind Simple Home Edit felt safer. Then something changed. I started actually getting to know the people following me. We were talking through Stories, sharing ideas and talking about our homes, families, food and all the normal stuff happening in our lives. Suddenly it felt strange that they were sharing themselves with me while I was hiding behind a name. Eventually I thought, I love this. Why am I hiding it?
Once I stopped caring what people might think, it became incredibly freeing. I wasn’t trying to create a persona.
It was just me.
Publishing my first cookbook was a huge one.
By then I had around 160,000 followers on Instagram and people kept messaging me asking, “When are you going to write a cookbook?”
My internal response was basically:
Who’s going to publish my cookbook? I’m not a chef. I’m just a mum who loves cooking dinner.
I’d convinced myself that if I ever did a book, I’d have to self-publish it. Then one day my sister-in-law Andy was at my house helping me and finally said, “Nic, please just email a publisher”. I had a publisher in mind but I was so convinced they wouldn’t be interested that she basically helped me write the email. We sent it.
And they replied. That email changed the trajectory of Simple Home Edit.
It’s funny to think there is an alternative universe where Andy wasn’t at my house that day and I’m possibly still sitting there telling everyone I’m going to self-publish a cookbook someday. 😂
Interestingly, the enormous growth had already begun before the first book was published.
When I first approached Pan Macmillan I had around 160,000 followers on Instagram. Then I made a really conscious decision to focus Simple Home Edit much more heavily on food. Until then I’d been sharing a mixture of home, decluttering, family life and food, and I’d spent a lot of my time talking to the community through Stories rather than creating content that lived beyond the day.
Once I started developing more recipes, filming them as Reels and sharing our dinners more consistently, the account grew by hundreds of thousands of people incredibly quickly.
That’s when it really skyrocketed. And it taught me something I’ve carried with me ever since: People weren’t necessarily looking for more types of content. They were mostly looking for help with the same thing. Dinner was the problem they needed solving. Once I understood that, everything changed.
The kindness.
Social media gets such a bad rap and I completely understand why, but my experience has overwhelmingly been the opposite. People are extraordinarily generous.
I’ll meet someone at a book signing or in the supermarket and they’ll speak to me like we’ve known one another for years – and strangely, it often feels like we have.
Someone in Sydney and someone on the other side of the world can be standing in their kitchens at exactly the same time trying to work out what to feed everybody. Our lives can look completely different and yet the daily stuff is remarkably similar.
People often message me saying thank you because a recipe has helped them. What they probably don’t realise is that I feel just as grateful to them.
I went from being a stay-at-home mum looking for connection and purpose to having millions of people invite me into their kitchens.
That’s an extraordinary gift.
There are so many. I receive messages from people going through grief, illness, new babies, financial stress or simply difficult seasons of life, who tell me the recipes have helped them keep putting food on the table. Those messages stay with me.
One really beautiful moment happened at one of my book signings.
There was a man waiting in a queue that was otherwise predominantly women. When he reached the front he looked slightly sheepish and said something along the lines of, “This is so embarrassing – I’m the only guy here”.
We got talking and he told me he had three teenage sons. His dad had taught him to cook and now he was doing the same for his boys.
That absolutely floored me. Suddenly it wasn’t just about a cookbook.
It was about food knowledge being passed from a father to his son and then from that son to another generation – and somehow my recipes had become a tiny part of that story.
You can’t plan for moments like that.
I was actually asked this by a young girl waiting to meet me at one of my book signings.
She loved cooking and could imagine herself sharing online and perhaps building something from it one day, but she was worried about what people would think.
My answer was really simple:
Start. And then keep showing up.
There are people who are better cooks than me, smarter than me and far better at making videos than me. But you don’t need to be the best at something to have something worth sharing.
You need to care about it, be willing to do the work and, most importantly, be yourself. I also think you should never reach a point where you believe you know it all. I certainly don’t.
I know what works for me and I share it in the hope that it might help somebody else, but I’m constantly learning – particularly from the people who follow me. They have different families, cultures, budgets, kitchens and experiences from mine. Their feedback has taught me enormously.
I think the best thing you can do is share rather than preach. This is what works for me. Maybe it will work for you too. And don’t let fear of what a handful of people might think stop you from finding the people who completely understand what you’re doing.
Quite a lot of it. 😂 There are definitely moments where I think, Has somebody made a mistake?
But I am still the same mum. Of course I’ve changed as a person in the last 7 years – I’d hope I have. I’ve learnt an enormous amount. I’ve gained confidence. I’ve done things I never thought in a million years I’d do. Something that began as a little hobby when I was home with my kids has become an enormous part of my life.
But I’m still making dinner, still navigating family life and still dealing with many of the same everyday things that led me to start Simple Home Edit in the first place.
And I think that’s why what I share applies to so many different people.
You don’t need to be a parent. I think about the 20-year-old version of me who was trying to work out what to cook for herself or her partner. There are people with grown children, people moving out of home, couples, families, people living alone.
Ultimately, everybody has to eat.
I’m just sharing what works for me in the hope that it makes that part of somebody else’s day a little easier.
So much.
One of the biggest things is that there is never just one way to do something.
The people who follow Simple Home Edit live all over the world. They have different cultures, budgets, families, kitchens, traditions and experiences.
Someone will leave a comment telling me how their mum makes something, how an ingredient is used where they live, or how they’ve adapted one of my recipes for their family – and I love that.
It constantly reminds me that I don’t know everything and I’m never going to.
I know what works in my home and I can share that, but there is always something to learn from somebody else. I think that’s made me a better cook, but probably a better person too.
Firstly, I’d like it officially recorded that I love breakfast. 😂
I have almost the same breakfast every day: coffee, sourdough toast and usually cottage cheese with avocado, or peanut butter with seeds, honey and cinnamon, maybe berries.
But breakfast doesn’t need me …
Dinner does.
Breakfast can be toast. Cereal. Oats. Yoghurt. Done.
Dinner rolls around after you’ve already lived an entire day.
You’ve worked, driven people places, answered messages, dealt with school things, cleaned something you swear you cleaned yesterday – and suddenly everybody would also like to know what they’re eating.
It’s relentless.
But dinner is also the meal where our family comes back together. So it somehow manages to be both the meal we struggle with most and one of the meals that matters most.
That’s why I’m obsessed with making it easier.
Don’t go shopping yet.
Which sounds strange because normally we decide we’re going to get organised, make a beautiful meal plan, write an enormous shopping list and head straight to the supermarket.
I’d do the opposite.
Open the fridge. Open the freezer. Look through the pantry.
Write down what you already have.
I think a lot of the overwhelm around dinner comes from having too much of the wrong stuff.
The fridge is packed, the pantry is packed, you can’t find anything and somehow you’re still standing there thinking, “We have no food”.
Start with what you have and build meals around that.
A packet of chicken schnitzels doesn’t only have to become chicken schnitzel and fries. A can of tuna doesn’t only have to become a tuna sandwich. Beans don’t need to sit in the pantry for 3 years waiting for you to become the type of person who knows what to do with them. 😂
Starting with what you already have saves money, reduces waste and makes the whole thing feel much more manageable.
Buying too much – and often buying for the fantasy week instead of the week we’re actually going to have.
You go shopping hungry and suddenly everything looks incredible.
You’re in the dressing aisle and before you know it you’ve bought the blue cheese dressing, caesar dressing, French onion dressing and some beautiful little condiment apparently intended for the much more organised version of yourself who will be hosting something fabulous on Tuesday.
Three months later they’re all half-used in the fridge door. 😂
I’ve learnt to buy versatile ingredients wherever I can. A really good whole-egg mayonnaise, for example, can become so many different dressings and sauces just by adding a few simple ingredients.
The more flexible the things in your kitchen are, the easier it is to cook with what you have and the less likely you are to waste food.
Nobody expects me to host.
I inflict it on myself. 😂
I love it.
We’ve worked really hard for our home and we have a beautiful entertaining space, so I want to use it.
Some of my strongest childhood memories are of people being around our table – Mum making enormous amounts of food, Dad with fish on the barbecue, spit roasts going, salads everywhere and people talking and eating for hours. Now I get to create versions of those memories for our own children.
And I seem to have inherited Mum’s inability to cater for the actual number of people attending. If twelve people are coming, there needs to be enough food for approximately thirty-eight. Apparently this is genetic.
But the more I entertain, the more I realise the goal isn’t to spend the entire time in the kitchen producing restaurant food. It’s to make something people will love, get as much done ahead as possible, put something generous on the table and then actually sit down with everyone and enjoy it.
That’s the whole point.
More than anything, I hope people feel like dinner can be simpler than they think.
I’m not here to tell anyone how they should cook or what their family should eat. I’m just sharing what works in our home in the hope that it makes someone else’s life a little easier too.
If a recipe helps someone get dinner on the table after a long day, saves them a trip to the supermarket, gives them something their kids actually eat, or simply makes them feel a little less overwhelmed at 5 pm, then that means everything to me.
At the end of the day, it’s just dinner. But dinner happens every single day – so if we can make that one part of life a little easier, I think that matters.
My new book, Simple Weeknights, is now available for pre-order! Click through to find a copy at your preferred retailer.
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