Newcastle foodie Ashleigh Hays has had a lifetime of adventures revolving around making meals

At 29 she’s spent a great deal of time travelling around Australia and the world. And the one thing she knows for sure is that creating meals and dishes is one of the things that makes her the happiest.

She could talk for hours about making ceviche from fresh fish caught from a river in northern Queensland, or baking bread in a Bolivian jungle, or preparing vast nightly buffets for Dubai millionaires with super yachts in Mykonos. 

But here in Newcastle - which she calls home when she’s not travelling - if she’s not working the kitchen at Scotties restaurant in Newcastle’s East End, she’s likely making up an original dish to share with friends on a night off.

Although Hays is not a trained chef, a fact she does not hide, through the sum of her experiences she has proven to be a talented foodie who can create something special from the barest of ingredients, or something extraordinary as a special events caterer.

“I feel so lucky I’ve found the thing I love,” she says, looking straight at you with her piercingly beautiful pale blue eyes, “because so many people, it takes them a long time to find what they love. I do get tired sometimes, but I Iove it so much I don’t mind. There’s something to learn every single day.”

Hays was lured to Scotties by owner Jenny Roberts last year when Hays was still in Indonesia after 14 months of world travel. A longtime fan of the lifestyle in the East End, Hays has enjoyed the work, adding her own touches to the popular restaurant’s fare, especially Thursday night curry specials.

Her unusual resume includes creating the first sandwiches and soups at Sprocket, and later working in the kitchen at One Penny Black as its reputation for innovative food and coffee saw it move from a small kitchen to its current successful location at the west end of Newcastle Mall.

Within a few months Hays will be travelling again, on the trail of an endless summer and new adventures in a part of the world she hasn’t seen yet. Central America, Mexico, America, Canada … or maybe further.

As many know already, the world travels with her. She’s avidly posts her food creations on instagram (formysenses) and boasts almost 8700 followers.

Hays has also recently reinvigorated her formysenses blog on the internet, posting images of her original meals as well as a narrative and recipes to match.

She’s not shy about giving credit to brother Brenton, who helped pull her into the jobs at Sprocket and One Penny Black, and her mum, Julianne, who she credits as an “amazing cook” in her own right.

Julianne was raised in Bega,to parents who were “very meat and three veg”, says Hays of her mum. “She married at 25. She moved out of home at 16 and had to look after herself. So she had to learn.

“She grew up Aussie-battler style. I guess she taught me those qualities.”

Ashleigh and Brenton’s favourite meal was home-made tacos, with all the fresh ingredients laid out on the dining table for them to make their own.

Hays is an ardent believer in fresh ingredients, and minimal wastage. She’s never had money to waste and is a master of creativity when it comes to making something out of nothing.

She left home at 17, studying art at TAFE. “I was a super-poor student eating brown rice and tuna and soy sauce,” she recalls.

Her next step was architecture studies at the University of Newcastle. She has vivid memories of signing up for a $10-a-week box of vegies. “I never knew what was going to be in it and I had to experiment,” she recalls. “I was doing the cooking for my housemates. I ended finding myself sitting in uni lectures writing down what I would make for dinner.”

She changed her major to primary school teaching, all the while picking up work in hospitality, which led to the job at Sprocket in the East End, one of Newcastle’s first hipster coffee cafes, with freshly roasted coffee beans and a funky vinyl music collection.

When Hays began at Sprocket the food came from an outside supplier and the cafe would frequently run out of stock. So Hays began preparing soups and salads herself, and customers began to call and ask her to save them a serving. Sprocket’s reputation for food was growing. “I started to realise people liked my cooking,” Hays says.

But alas, the travel bug bit and she hit the road.

“It was during that year I realised how much I loved food and cooking and the culture around cooking,” she says. “At the markets I watched women, buying food, feeding families, cooking.”

She actually wrote to TAFE about getting into cooking school, but she never got a response. “I guess it’s a blessing in disguise that nobody ended up getting back to me about that,” she says.

Near the end of her year of travels she and her companions had run out of money. So they volunteered to work in animal sanctuary in the Bolivian jungle.

“We were looking after wild animals that had been mistreated when they were young,” she recounts. “We were looking after pumas. It was a little bit scary so I decided to let my friends deal with the pumas and I took over the cooking position for everyone in the camp. There was no electricity. We had to bake our bread in a wood-fired oven and use gas to cook pots of rice and beans.

“Once a week I sat top of a logging truck to go to a little town market [Rurrenabaque] across the Amazon River. It was really great. We had such limited ingredients, but I was really happy to make people happy. I’d make bread rolls instead of bread, lentil burgers instead of lentils. It was hard work, but fun.”

After South America, it was home to Newcastle, where her brother Brenton had landed her an interview for a job at One Penny Black, which had great coffee and a tiny kitchen in its original Newcastle Mall location. Thus began two years of free rein making creative sandwiches, at first with only a cooktop and a sandwich press.

“It was so busy, it was just mental,” she says.

After saving money, it was on the road again, for 14 months of exploration around Australia and Europe. 

The Australia adventure with a friends in a pair of four-wheel-drives involved much living off the bounty of the land. 

She fondly recalls the thrill of fishing with friends from a dinghy in a north Queensland river as crocodiles lay on the banks, then taking the catch of the day and adding freshly-picked limes and chillies, making coconut milk from fresh coconuts and concocting ceviche.

“It tasted so good,” she says. “We knew we’d found everything. That kind of cooking  is like heaven, so fresh.”

They got jobs in Darwin, with Hays working for a hot-headed Chinese fishmonger. “It was a stinky, stinky place. It was a really tough job. The people were rough. They were hard to understand. I would always get in trouble with the Chinese boss. But I learned heaps about seafood.”

By fortune, they were housesitting on a property with a dozen chickens, papaya and banana trees and a huge garden. 

“We gave ourselves a challenge of only $5 a day to spend,” she says. “I would bring home seafood and we’d have spinach, papayas, bananas, chillies, eggs. We hardly had to buy anything.”

Does she consider herself lucky?

“It’s just being open to any opportunities that come along.”

The trip changed focus as they flew to Germany, where they were hosted by a traveller they had met in Australia. They picked white asparagus and strawberries near Walldorf (see the recipe at formysenses.com) in Germany and travelled the continent for a month in a van. Hays enjoyed finding wild thyme and oregano near an Italian river one night, nursing a “pet” basil plant which they plucked regularly and camping in forests and vineyards (albeit illegally).

At one point, Hays worked on her own as a cook at villa in Mykonos for Dubai millionaires on holiday with their super yacht. “It was the hardest job, hardest job I’ve ever done,” she says. But it certainly tested her resourceful to feed up to 30 people three meals a day – and always have a freshly-made cake on the table by dinner.

All those experiences have added to her confidence. Since returning to Australia she has catered some weddings and hens’ parties with success.

And with a new camera, she’s taking photos of her dishes and adding new recipes to blog again.

“I not ready to settle down yet,” she says. “I’m really excited to do more travel.”