If you had to describe yourself as a meal, what would it be? What dish might capture your personality – the strengths, the flaws, the quirks that make you who you are?
For Julie Goodwin, Australia’s first MasterChef winner turned best-selling author, the answer is simple: lasagna.
“It’s a big hug in a dish. It’s generous, it’s hearty, it’s yummy, and it’s got lots of cheese,” she laughs.
If you’re after one of those hugs, her recipe is easy enough to find. And it comes with history. Goodwin credits the dish with helping land a boyfriend named Mick in the 1980s. Decades later, he’s husband Mick, and they’ve been together ever since.
That same warmth now underpins Goodwin’s first live theatre tour, currently travelling through regional New South Wales. Blending cooking, storytelling, career reflections, and audience questions, the show promises the kind of intimacy audiences have come to associate with her.
“We’ll be talking about life in general, the light and the shade and, and how we navigate that,” Goodwin told Starts at 60.
The Your Time Starts Now tour sees Goodwin travelling in a Star RV motorhome – a fitting symbol for a life defined by movement. The tour kicked off in Wagga Wagga and Bathurst this weekend, and is performing tonight in Dubbo.
Goodwin will be at ‘The Doylo’ on the NSW Central Coast this coming Friday (13 February), Tamworth on Saturday and Narrabri on Sunday. The tour wraps up with one more weekend of shows, on Friday (20 February) in Port Macquarie and Coffs Harbour the next day, with her Star RV serving as her home away from home for the whole journey.
Seventeen years after MasterChef propelled her from suburban anonymity into the national spotlight, her journey has been anything but predictable.
It has delivered remarkable highs, sobering lows, and ultimately a path toward rebuilding and redemption.
Before television fame, Goodwin’s life was already full. She was raising three boys while helping manage her husband’s IT consulting business – a workload that left little room for anything else.
Then, in late 2008, Channel 10 called for contestants for the inaugural season of MasterChef Australia. It was Goodwin’s best friend who pushed her to apply.
She rushed her entry on the final day and promptly forgot about it – until the phone rang.
“I got a phone call asking me to come for the audition. I nearly didn’t go because it was my oldest son’s first day of high school,” Goodwin remembered.
“But in the end, I decided to go and I went down to Darling Harbour and there were hundreds of people queued up along the foreshore. We had to take a dish with us, one that didn’t require cooking on the day, just something that we had cooked.”
She arrived carrying a citrus syrup cake, a mini pavlova, and a mini crème brûlée – complete with a last-minute blowtorch.
“We cooks, we travel with blowtorches and all sorts of stuff. Should see my handbag,” Goodwin laughed.
By day’s end, she had secured a place in the semi-finals.
“At the end of that day, I was through to the semi-finals, which was the last 50 people. We had to go into a hotel and compete until there were 20 of us left, and then we went into the house. And every day and at every stage, I was pinching myself.”
The next audition brought her face-to-face with judges Gary Mehigan, George Calombaris, and Matt Preston. Contestants were required to bring everything – ingredients, utensils, even oil and salt.
“I had stuff ready in case I got through, and I only found out quite late, I think it was about 9:30 that night they rang and said ‘You’re on again. Be back here at seven in the morning’.”
“I loaded my whole kitchen into two giant suitcases and all my ingredients into a big esky and back down I went the next day.”
Cooking lamb rump with garlic mashed potatoes, Goodwin delivered the dish that would carry her forward.
“I remember it like it was yesterday, even though it’s 17 years ago. I remember, they tasted it, and they have these inscrutable faces. They didn’t give much away, but then after Matt tasted it, he came around to my side of the bench and gave me a great big hug and said ‘It tastes like real food. It’s got so much flavour. Then, the three of them gave me the nod, I got the apron, and I was through to the top 50.”
What followed was a rapid dismantling of ordinary life. Within weeks, the suburban working mother who had applied on a whim was preparing to move into the MasterChef house for a five-month production schedule.
“I only found out while I was in the top 50 week that I would have to live out of home. If I had known that, I wouldn’t have applied because I had three little boys and a business to run. It’s lucky I didn’t know that, because my whole life might be different.
“All I knew was that I was going to compete from 20 to 1. I didn’t know how many weeks it would be. I didn’t know if I’d be the first person eliminated. I remember as I was saying goodbye to [husband] Mick as I was leaving the coast to head down, and I was a bit emotional, but he says ‘it’s OK babe, calm down. You might be home in a few days.’
“So yeah, we really didn’t know what was coming. We truly and honestly did not know. I had to get over a fair bit of mum guilt to go away from my kids like that.”
Progressing through elimination after elimination, Goodwin adopted a deceptively simple mindset.
“All I’ve got to do on any given elimination day is to be better than one person on that day. So I just held on to that notion that I’ve only got to eliminate one person, not 10 people, just one, and then I’d get through to the next round and away we go again.”
Then came the finale – and the win.
“Everything felt surreal. I think if there was to be a psychologist observing, they would have described shock. I was in shock and then they brought my family in, and I was in shock and overjoyed.”
Life afterwards was both whirlwind and rollercoaster. Guided by professional management – the same team she works with today – Goodwin found herself juggling television appearances, cookbooks, breakfast radio, a cooking school, her family, and the business she stepped back into running.
Eventually, the pace caught up with her.
It culminated in a total breakdown, something Goodwin attributes to perfectionism and a tendency to take on too much.
“After I came home from MasterChef, Joe [my oldest] was in high school, and he came home one day and presented me with this piece of paper and he said, ‘I’m still adding to it, but this is the list of people who want to come over for dinner.’
“Every person who said, ‘I’d love to come to your place for dinner’, he wrote them on this list, and he seriously thought we’re all going to come over for dinner. I’m like ‘you know what you can do with that list, Joe?’”
Perspective, she says, came through experience.
“I’ve learned that life is all about choices and some choices are hard and sometimes you have to consider your own health and wellbeing ahead of other people’s feelings. I learned that when I’m so unwell that I can’t function, I’m no good to anybody.”
Despite everything, much about Goodwin’s life remains unchanged. She still lives in the same house she did when she won MasterChef. The same friendships endure. There are still backyard barbecues, summer swims, and grocery runs – the quiet architecture of an ordinary life beneath an extraordinary career.
“I know a lot more than I did before I went on MasterChef. I’ve been on the most beautiful learning pilgrimage. I’ve had the privilege of being able to take something that was an obsession and turn it into a livelihood,” Goodwin said, with grace and appreciation in her tone.
“I’m 17 years more experienced in the kitchen than I was, but my food philosophy hasn’t changed. I still view food and mealtimes as a vehicle for gathering people. If you can get your family around the dinner table, the food becomes secondary to the people. Put something on the table, sit down and connect with each other. It’s a love language. And I believe it should be generous and abundant and full of flavour, it should be joyful and it should be fun and it should be prepared together, it should be eaten together, and it should be cleaned up together.”
Like her signature lasagna, Goodwin’s story is ultimately about nourishment — comfort layered with resilience, generosity shaped by hardship, and the understanding that the best meals, and the best lives, are the ones shared.