Wandering Cooks

10/10/2025

The Cooks Co-op Newsletter drops today.

Interested in the ins and outs of running a food cooperative, the mistakes and successes? You might enjoy this monthly read.

Interested in joining as a member? We'd love you to read along - it'll give you a good feel for what we're about.

Help us make room for more stock with a spring clean out... and prizes!

12/09/2025

This is our new Cooks Co-op newsletter. It's for both members and (yet to be) members. We aim at being as transparent as we can be, about how our Co-op works. We welcome your curiosity! Plus, we're also inviting people to our next Meetup, if you want to see what it's like (and you can do a wee bit of shopping, too). Grab a cuppa and have a read if you're interested. xx Ange

Plus we're bursting to talk about dates, decisions and so many delectables.

09/06/2025

We offer two options in tamari and two options in mirin to our co-op; just enough to satisfy our current members' desires.

If you're a working member, this agedashi inspired meal will set you back $7.50 or $5.25 a person, depending on which products you choose.

Why two of each, not one, not five?

We are avid cooks, compelled by the kind of artistry epitomised by Ito Shoten Tamari and Mikawa Mirin. And, we are budget conscious.

Ito Shoten is made by the ninth and eleventh generations (grandfather and grandson) of a 200 year old family company. And Mikawa Mirin is made by the Sumiya family, the last of the traditional mirin makers.

Even though we keep their pricing exceptionally low, these are still very special day items when you're on a tight budget. So, we also sell Spiral Foods organic mirin and tamari. Eventually, we plan to stock these in 20L drums, making them even better value for our co-op.

Also in the mix:
Wadaman toasted sesame seeds, Yamaki Jozo dashi powder. (Both of these + Ito Shoten Tamari and Mikawa Mirin are accessible in Australia due to the efforts of Fino Foods with the help of Nancy Singleton Hachisu, who, btw, is also THE BEST and I mention her because these are two of her cookbooks opened to three different agedashi recipes because our photograph of the finished meal was NOT THE BEST)
Earth Source Foods Biodynamic Silken Tofu
Riverina Sustainable Growers Opus Rice
Tapioca Starch
Spring onions from the garden
Water from the tap

02/06/2025

When Wandering Cooks said goodbye in May 2022, many of us felt the loss. It wasn't just a business —it was our family. We believed we were growing something better, together.

We all got on with things in the quiet that followed. New work, new loves, new lives… but we didn’t forget the magic, or want it less.

I (Ange) have spent the last few years working in a great organisation. But it’s also helped me remember what having a boss feels like, and why, in my mid thirties, I decided I wouldn’t have one anymore, which led to me starting Cooks and becoming the boss.

Now, I'm looking for bosslessness.

What if we can resurrect the magic… the producers wandering in every day and gathering around food, the rejection of the heartless, the corporatised, the industrialised... what if we can resurrect all this but reform it into something owned by everyone?

18 months ago, 3 households, all ex-Cookers, started gathering food together. Then, we invited more households into the fold.

Every month, we gather together to shop, with working members weighing up bulk purchases of flour, grains, nuts, oils — all manner of them. Then we reflect together and improve. We’re constantly reworking our system for divvying up a whole cow. We share snacks, hold babies and help each other to the car with mountains of food. We’re discovering that the work itself—the ordering, weighing, debating and baby minding—weaves us together. The "inconvenience" of participation rather than the soulless ease of a supermarket turns out to be the source of our collective abundance.

Most recently we’ve added a weekly grocery box to our offerings, to facilitate fresh fruit and vegetables.

We're called Cooks' Co-op, for now. It’s a nod to our origins, with a new commitment to ‘us’.

Every month we open our doors just a little wider, with an invitation to more households - to kindred spirits, who share our longing for the magic and want to weave us with it. So if you've been looking for a different way to feed yourself and your loved ones—one that connects rather than isolates, that builds rather than extracts—you may have found your people.

We take on a maximum of 5 new member-households every month. We’ll keep a waiting list after we fill these places. Email us (see our profile) if you're interested. xx

02/06/2022

Thank you so much to 's James Frostick for this very beautiful article on the history and legacy of Wandering Cooks.

https://m.theweekendedition.com.au/food-drink/the-legacy-of-wandering-cooks/

At this strange and occasionally anxious time, it is an enormous consolation to hear from some of the wonderful and talented Cooks and thinkers that really did need what our little warehouse gave to them.

Faced with the wild reality of making food as business, some forged ahead toward great things, some turned around and went other ways, and a great many learned the subtle and endlessly valuable art of adaptation (which the last few years would most certainly have rewarded).

I am very proud to have been a small part of so many great stories.

And even as is sit here licking my wounds and counting the costs, please let me assure you that I'm ok, and that I feel well supported. Plus, in the midst of it all, there is one thing I know without a shadow of a doubt; it was all, absolutely, worth it.

Lots of love to everyone,
Ange
xoxo

20/05/2022

**THANK YOU, INFINITELY

You cannont know what it has meant to recieve the overwhelming deluge of kindness, thanks, friendship, admiration and warmth over the last day. It has made a frankly painful time somehow incredibly beautiful too.

With everything that's going on, I don't like my chances of getting back to the many, many messages, comments, posts and calls that have come through since yesterday, but you must know how much they mean, individually and as a tsunami of love.

As a small gift and by way of acknowledgment, I repost this exquisitely lovely instant in Cook's aesthetic history. An instant, among many, in which our unending sense of silliness somehow tripped us into an image that is rather sincere and beautiful.

I have always loved how meaningful things emerge from the most innocuous moments if you surround yourself with good people and good intentions.

I miss the opportunity to summons magic from the world of Cooks immensely.

Lots of love,
Ange.
xoxo

19/05/2022

Wandering Cooks is closed. For good.

Friends, family, customers and community.

Wandering Cooks, the project to which I have devoted myself for the last decade, is closed for good. It is time to accept that the market has made this decision an obvious, if not extremely difficult, one.

We were, at first, an idea about good food and how it might be innovated. Food trucks in an illegally bonfire-warmed carpark. Little kitchens for great food ideas to germinate and (hopefully) blosssom. A bar. Countless community events and gatherings. Ideas shared, both good and very crap.

Then, something called a lock down happened. The irreparable exodus of so many of our partners, and the effective end of what we'd long been. A year or so in the dark. Then, gently, a farmer's market, some coffee, then a little food of our own. Then a lot of food of our own. Then eviction from our home of 8 years. What the hell?

Then - bu**er it - a new home. A total rebuild and move. A full blown commercial kitchen serving up to hundreds a night. And then...growth, growth, growth...my God, this might actually work...!?

Alas. Borders open. New year, new world. A ghost town, again.

It's time.

I want to thank everyone in our community for supporting us. It has been a privilege to serve and share this experience with you.

When I look back, it is the people that fill my personal file with joy. My beautiful, generous, bright staff. Our varied, curious, eager kitchen partners. The regular customers and their company. The incredible, hard-working, valiant farmers and makers that have given us a reason to be proud of every product we're ever sold.

This week, my son pulled out the last of his baby teeth like a bath plug. His childhood was here.

In many ways, this business has never had a premise. It's been people.

And at the end of the day, none of the things that really matter is in any way diminished by our closing. We have each other, our friends, our families and our memories. Lonely people found each other. Children were born.

So I guess I don't really know what the question of Wandering Cooks was after all. But I reckon the answer turned out to be love.

Ange.

xoxo

17/05/2022

**CLOSED TONIGHT

With apologies to everyone, Wandering Cooks will be closed this evening.

Please support our neighbors and friends in food and drink in our place. They deserve (and very much need) your custom.

Lots of love,
Ange and Co.

xoxo