Chrissie Swan "'I CAN'T SAY NO TO FUN!"

Earlier this year, Chrissie Swan set herself a personal challenge: To start clearing her plate and saying no to things that take up too much time. But when a special new project came her way in the form of her first cookbook, she broke her own rules to embrace it with abandon.

- WORDS by TIFFANY DUNK

For a while now, Chrissie Swan's 14-year-old son, Kit, has been nagging her.

A growing interest in cooking has led her middle child to repeatedly beg his mum to write down the recipes for the dishes he loves, so that he can recreate them too.

“I’d just say, Kit, you can watch me one day with a notepad because they’ve got a name for it – an ‘intuitive cook’ – meaning you just make it up as you go along,” she laughs of her approach to creating the meals that, like many mums, she will cook every evening for her family.

And then someone came to Kit’s rescue.

Book publisher Pan Macmillan had also noticed Chrissie’s knack for cooking. Like many others, they’d seen her stint on Celebrity MasterChef Australia in 2021. They’d also noticed that whenever she talked about cooking or posted recipe hacks on her social media, it would be eagerly picked up by her huge community of followers.

She’d been approached before, she tells The Weekly now, to write a cookbook. But she’d always shut it down, thinking of the huge amount of work that would have to take place to get the recipes “out of my mad head and onto a piece of paper for a normal person to cook”.

But with Kit, she jokes, “ramping up the harassment” the timing was a perfect storm when Pan Macmillan came knocking. And so The Shortcut Queen was born; a collection of 80 recipes beloved by the Swan family and their friends over generations, with tips on how to cut out any extra fuss while not losing any delicious flavour in the process.

The irony of adding yet another project to her brimming schedule which includes her Nova radio show, a podcast, various TV projects including hosting Seven’s rebooted Healthy, Wealthy & Wise and raising her three kids – Leo, 17, Kit, and Peg, 12 – isn’t lost on her.