Sarah Graham: from blog to book to bitten

Sarah Graham has found foodie fame about as quickly and naturally as it takes to grow a veggie garden. We touched base with her recently in the midst of another successful adventure to chat about her humble journey and things to come.

And so a blog is born

Before Sarah’s days as a foodie extraordinaire, her life was that of the co-founder and marketing manager for African Impact, working alongside husband Rob, where frequent travel and thus simple food were both a priority and an inspiration. So with her heart beating increasingly louder in the kitchen, Sarah made time to attend cooking courses, spending countless hours working on her own relationship with food, cooking and conjuring up recipes of her own and above all, keeping it simple. She tells us Rob was a gracious judge on her taste test panel but then who wouldn’t be, hey?

Eager to create a home for her food journey, Sarah Graham’s blog,  a foodie lives here found its feet after many hours of commitment and dedication. Every wordsmith and cook has a role model though. Sam Linsell of Drizzle and Dip and Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen are the names that pop up when asking about Sarah’s icons in the virtual world of food writing.

From virtual pages to paper pages

With her food blog still a sapling in web years, but quickly gaining popularity, Sarah decided to take a brave and rather inspired leaf from the pages of other food bloggers and sent in a recipe book proposal to Random House Struik publishers. Not too many moons later and much to her delight, she found herself face to face with a book contract. When asked why she thought the cards played in her favour, Sarah simply said, she must have been in the right place, at the right time.

Her unabashed repertoire of tweaked and fine-tuned old family recipes wrapped in the convivial conversational style emerged months later on cookbook shelves everywhere. Sarah had decided to take a bite of something bigger. Bitten is the fruition of that bold leap.

We hear her second book will be making its appearance next February, so keep an eye out for that.

Paper cuts to action cuts

So how does something spiral so quickly into a succession of successes? Well, according to Sarah Graham, if it is your undeniable passion, the kind that consumes you, then you will simply get caught up in the forward momentum. In other words, just roll with it. Her long term vision was always to connect with people and since everybody has to eat, television was a good medium for doing so.

Her new series takes place in Cape Town, where she says her foodie journey began, in a location scouted kitchen, kitted out with, yep you guessed it, a host of goodies from Yuppiechef. Unlike many progressions, that often leave behind their predecessor, Sarah’s show is an extension of her blog, giving us a glimpse into what might give rise to the creation of a recipe and thus, the ensuing article. In doing so, it sets the context for who Sarah is and her philosophy about food.

Sarah’s new series Bitten: Sarah Graham cooks Cape Town airs on Sunday 5th May on SABC 3 at 3.30pm. Lucky for us, we got a peek behind the scenes and you can be sure we’ll spill the scoop on that any day now.

Until then, keep supporting and following our homegrown foodie, either on her blog,  facebook page or on her twitter feed. We’re such huge fans of yours, Sarah.