Celebrated foodie reinvents herself and publishes her first cookbook

East-London born make-up artist turned Instagram food entrepreneur Neo Nontso launched her cookbook this month. Nontso went from travelling the world with the likes of Anele Mdoda and Shekinah as a make-up artist to being a celebrated foodie on Instagram with well over 300,000 followers.

She began sharing recipes on Instagram in 2018, but everything picked up during the global coronavirus pandemic and all led to her cookbook titled @dinewithneo – My Insta Feast.  

I caught up with Neo over the phone where she told me how she feels being a published author.

“It feels unreal, I’ve been waiting for [this] for so many years… you know when you’re working on something, you don’t realise it’s real until you get the product in your hands. And you’re just like wow!” she says. 

Nontso says she started developing the recipes in the book five years ago.  She would often taste certain dishes during her travels then come back home and tweak them by using local ingredients.

“[it was] kind of making regular recipes available to South Africans... it did take some time. I started writing this book towards the end of last year – it took was about eight months to compile the whole book with the research that I had done for five years.”

An example of how she tweaked the recipes is her creamy chicken stew recipe. Nontso says this is one of her favourite recipes and was an absolute hit with her Instagram followers. It was also one of the recipes that inspired the book as it was one of her earliest recipes.

“Chicken stew is a staple that we have in South African homes, I got bored with it, to be honest. The way it was made… I thought to myself, you know we have to add a twist to this thing, so I said you know what, how about we make this creamy? Just make it a little bit more velvety than the chicken stew we all grew up with.”  

Nontso says another favourite recipe of hers is the paella recipe she has as she’s "very drawn to seafood" and "Spanish flavours".  On her travels, Nontso would also try to taste local foods in the places they travelled to. In Los Angeles, she ordered all the foods that caught her eye via a delivery service.

She said her love for burgers was sparked there and declared that Americans are undisputed when it came to making burgers. She said she also enjoyed tacos and quesadilla made by Mexican vendors and even had a quesadilla recipe in one of the sections titled "Dirty Dining" in her book.

In Botswana, she enjoyed many foods, some that stood out was a slow cooked ground beef dish, and she was also fascinated by the smoothness of the pap that she was served.

“It’s actually weird how food from Botswana is so different from the food in SA considering how close our borders are.”

She also took herself to Barcelona and was able to take a cooking class – she said she learnt how to incorporate spices, how to use natural flavours and how to thicken stews without using flours and soup bases. She also went on another trip to Thailand where she was introduced to Thai food for the first time, and she also took a week-long cooking course, and these experiences strengthened her knowledge.   

“Sometimes when you’re stuck in one place you end up hitting a wall because you feel like your knowledge needs to be refreshed somewhere from a different point of view. Travelling helped me take the knowledge I already had and elevate it. “

Nontso says that her top two chefs are Bobby Flay and Chrissy Teigan because she enjoys the way they relate to food, in a humorous and fun way, and she feels she’s the same. “It’s important to find chefs that are relatable because it makes it easier to learn.”

Nontso also has spices and herbs brand DWB, which she started with her brother at the end of 2020.  She started the business after her audience asked her about the spices she uses and just general advice on spices, and she saw a chance for a business.

“It took a lot of work, I travelled all over the country looking for the best spices. We started with a range of eight… There were a lot of challenges but the results were fantastic. “

Nontso said hiccups in business were great because they offered an opportunity to learn and you were guaranteed not to hit the same hiccup twice.

Her spices are available online. “It was a life-changing time for me, I got to fall in love with myself, I got to realise how powerful women are and how women can reinvent themselves at any time. We’ve been created so wonderfully, I saw it in myself.

"I re-invented myself so many times during that time, I resigned as a make-up artist, I started influencing, stopped influencing and started my spice business from there I opened a dark kitchen... in the whole period of lockdown. It was a time of recreation.”

Nontso hopes that her readers enjoy her book and feel like she’s with them in their kitchen when they use it. “I hope they can receive me as well as they received me on social media.”