Angie Prendergast-Sceats once was an olive oil judge, where she had to watch out for vintages that tasted like “rancid feet” and “baby vomit” (such references really did appear on the flavour chart that’s deployed in these contests).

But for the last three years, she’s been the culinary director and head chef of Two Good, which used recipes by top chefs (Peter Gilmore, Christine Manfield, Ben Shewry) to create soups and salads that would be sent to women in domestic violence shelters. You’d order two soups: keep one and the other would be donated to someone in a refuge. The food was cooked by women from shelters, who were paid above-award wages to do so. In her role, Angie would oversee this work – and there some memorable/hilarious times when they did their cooking in a nightclub’s not-so-conventional kitchen – and she also ran Two Good’s Work Work program, training long-term unemployed women, refugees and disenfranchised people to help them get jobs. It was far from the aggressive stereotype of a kitchen where you could yell at someone to hurry up with the carrots; in working with people who might not know how to hold a knife or are still dealing with trauma, cooking 1000 meals a week is a different kind of challenge.

We also talk about Angie’s recipes – which appear in the new Two Good cookbook, her memorable trips to Japan (where she had nine bowls of ramen in five hours and visited a 1000-year-old miso shop) and what she’s doing next with her Angie’s Food enterprise.

You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or download it via RSS or directly (or just hit the ‘play’ button above)! You can also find it on Stitcher and Google Podcasts nowadays. Major kudos to anyone who drops some nice words about this show on Apple Podcasts, plus thank you to anyone who subscribes to this podcast and lets me know how much they like listening to it – it really is so cheering to hear.

Photography of the vegetarian feast and Angie Prendergast-Sceats, courtesy of the Two Good cookbook, photographed by Petrina Tinslay and styled by David Morgan, available now for $39.99.