Annabel Langbein  Annabel Rose Langbein (born 1958) is a New Zealand celebrity cook, food writer and publisher. She has published 25 cookbooks and fronted three seasons of her TV series, "Annabel Langbein The Free Range Cook", which launched on the TV One network in New Zealand and has since screened in more than 90 countries. She is the daughter of Fred and Anne Langbein and is married to Ted Hewetson, with whom she has two children. Her father worked in a city office but was a keen vegetable gardener and beekeeper, while her mother was a cook and home science university graduate. She credits her mother as the inspiration for her cooking. Langbein met husband Ted while working as a possum trapper on his family's farm on the East Cape of New Zealand. As a teenager in the 1970s, Langbein says she was a fully-fledged hippie and feminist, railed against domesticity, consumerism and the urban world in general, and left home and school at the age of 16. Her mother took her to Europe in the hope of showing her the 'real world' but on her return she moved up the Whanganui River with some friends to enjoy an alternative lifestyle growing vegetables, cooking over a fire and living off the land. For several years she hunted and fished for much of her own food, and it was during this time that she honed her cooking skills through endless experimentation. She started to cook for a living when she went to Gisborne to work as a chef in a friend's restaurant. But she soon realised that she didn't want to cook the same food every day and used the opportunity to save money for an overseas experience. She travelled the world experimenting with different flavours but got sick in South America and ended up living in Brazil for a year and starting her own croissant business there. She eventually made her way back to New Zealand. A life-threatening experience in the 1980s, when she was thrown from a horse and given virtually no chance of walking again, reinforced for Langbein the importance of safeguarding her wellness and making the most of each day. She experienced a ‘eureka’ moment when she realised she could change people's lives by sharing her knowledge of cooking and eating well, and confounded the doctors by making a complete recovery. She and Ted now live on the shores of Lake Wanaka, in New Zealand's spectacular Southern Alps, where over more than 20 years they have transformed a patch of boggy bush into extensive gardens and orchards.