My name is Unna (pron. Ah-na), AKA The Forest Cantina. I post mostly food + travel guides and renovation blogs to our first home. 

 

I'm a 42-year-old mum of two boys, Jah (19 yrs old) and Leo (9yrs old) and wife to Aaron, who owns his own building company. Wellington, New Zealand is where we call home and we live on the outskirts of a little suburban forest.  The 'forest' part of the name The Forest Cantina is based on where we live and 'cantina' because it is another name for my kitchen/place that I love to serve food from.

I created this website on 1st January 2014 and also started Instagramming around the same time. This leads me to become a magazine food columnist and a published cookbook author within the same year, and then I self-published my second cookbook, The Forest Cantina - HOME which was released on June 9th, 2017. To pay for the production and printing of the book, I ran a 30 day Kickstarter campaign and managed to raise $55,500! I am forever grateful to the 497 people who pledged, and to the businesses that shared and supported the campaign to make it all possible.

I have also taught sold-out food styling and photography workshops around the country and styled food for two TV commercials for an international client. Now I work as a content creator (food stylist, food photographer and recipe developer) for some of New Zealand's most well-known brands and companies. I have worked with over 50 businesses to date. The work I create for my clients either gets used on their social media pages or websites, for packaging and design purposes, new product release content or for advertising. You can view my client portfolio of work I have done HERE. 

As well as food styling and photography, my husband and I have been busy renovating our first home.  I am looking forward to sharing more 'room reveal' posts with every area that we complete in the 'renovation' section of my site. 

This site is a platform for me to not only share my love of all things food, home renovations but also travel too. For weekly updates, follow me on Instagram and if you would like to get in touch about hiring me or for a potential collaboration, I would love to hear from you. Please send me an email via my contact page.

Unna x