Yael Shochat's Middle Eastern Chicken and Rice Photo: Callum Thomas/Random House
Auckland chef and restaurateur Yael Shochat grew up in the Israeli city of Haifa, eating fresh local market foods at home and at the local Arabic and Jewish restaurants. When she came to New Zealand in the late 1990s it was very hard to find the kind of food she was used to back home, so she opened her own place, The Lunch Box, and later Ima, a restaurant and deli in the central city. Ima means mother in Hebrew
Yael Shochat has just released a book of recipes called Ima Cuisine, and shares one of them with us, for Middle Eastern chicken and rice.
