She won fans around the world with her soulful sound, but in recent years Christchurch musician Flip Grater has been making her mark in the kitchen — changing the face of Kiwi Christmas one furkey at a time, writes Seven Sharp reporter Rachel Parkin.
Her smile widened as she swung open the door to her greenhouse.
“Welcome to my happy place, urgh I love it in here," Grater told me, stroking a stunning stash of coriander before pulling up sharply at the basil.
“Oh no, there’s some bugs on here, got some aphids going on,” she giggled, sheepishly.
“Texture,” I replied, and we carried on.
Grater is unashamedly vegan.
“Which came first… music or food?” I asked her, as we lounged on her leafy deck.
“Good question,” she replied. “I always loved both but was never obsessed with food. I only got into food because I turned vegan at 15 and my mother refused to cook for me.”
“That’ll do it!” I laughed.
“It was a great gift actually because I got to experiment with food for the first time and experiment with flavours,” she said, eyes bright.
Alison Holst’s vegetarian cookbook, Grater said, became her “bible”.
“Bless her,” she said, smiling.
But as life rolled on, music became Grater’s main jam — her joie de vivre.
“Really, my whole adult life was dedicated to music and touring and living a pretty hedonistic lifestyle, travelling around the world doing music.”
Until, her cornichon conundrum.
Grater was living in Paris – circa 2012 - when frustration with a lack of plant-based options took hold.
At the end of most days, as the French do, she would have “un apero”.
“You know when we lived in Paris there were always these beautiful platters of charcuterie and beautiful grazing antipasti products and I would just eat the cornichons (mini gherkins) in the corner,” Grater said.
“I felt like things could be more, you know? Vegetarian and vegan eaters are foodies too and we need more... we need protein… and we need things that are delicious.”
“There is more to life than cornichons?” I suggested.
“There is more to life than cornichons,” Grater confirmed, smiling.
“I wanted to have my vegan cake and eat it too.”
Fast-forward to now and she’s doing just that, for herself, and thousands of others.
See, when Grater came home to Christchurch to start a family with her French beau, another seed started to grow. She would make a range of plant-based food so vegans and flexitarians had options and could stick to their cause.
“The biggest impact we can have on our planet is to reduce our meat and dairy consumption,” she told me. “There’s no more powerful thing we can do.”
What started with chorizo and salami in her tiny kitchen with whanau mucking in, rolled into “furkeys” and “chickuns” and before Grater knew it, Grater Goods was born.
“Then we took over a little kitchen in industrial Sydenham and started making sandwiches and selling out the window to plant-based pilgrims who came along,” she said.
That got so popular tables were put out front and Grater took over the building.
Nowadays she runs two full-time kitchens and a bistro/deli.
And then there’s the faux chook.
Furkey and chickun.
Five years ago Grater Goods took 200 orders for handmade, plant-based turkeys. This year they’ll make 10 thousand.
“So, the life of a furkey?” I said as we entered the chiller.
“Yep, these are happily farm-raised chickpeas turned into furkeys and chickuns,” Grater said, with a grin.
“And you don’t have to deal with goop!” I said.
“No goop! It’s a goop-free zone and it’s a giblet-free zone, legless, wingless…” Grater said.
For her though, it’s not about turkey versus furkey. It’s about choice and celebrating life.
“I think the thing that music and food have in common is they bring people together and people gather around them and I think that's the wonderful thing about this time of year."
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