Donal Skehan

The chef, author and TV presenter tells how his love of travel has informed his culinary style, and reveals when he fell in love with pasta

What was your favourite childhood meal?

This is always an easy answer — my mom’s Irish stew! I’ve great memories of dark days coming home from school, and doing my homework with the kitchen windows all steamed up because the stew had been simmering away all afternoon.

The meal you’ll always remember?

Travel has always been my biggest source of inspiration for the food I cook, and one of the best meals I’ve ever had was on a plastic stool in Hanoi, eating a spicy beef jerky and papaya salad as the city whizzed by. Dinner for less than five quid — incredible food cooked by someone who had been making the same incredible dish day in day out — the epitome of artisan grub!

First dish you ever cooked?

Pancakes with my mom for Pancake Tuesday. I loved baking as a child, and I knew how to help out cooking the Sunday roast, but I didn’t really cook dinner myself until I was around 12 or 13 when my grandmother gave me an Asian cookery book. I loved cooking through that, and I do remember making home-made sweet-and-sour chicken.

What’s your comfort food?

Pasta, pasta and more pasta, there’s nothing better than a decent bowl of pasta. Two years ago, I travelled through Italy filming a series called Grandma’s Boy which had me cooking with nonnas [grannies] from Rome to Bari and everywhere in between. I saw pasta in every shape and form, and absolutely fell in love.

What’s your hangover cure?

Depends what sort of night we’re dealing with! A green smoothie if I need to function, but a decent bacon sandwich on batch bread with lots of butter if the sofa has my name on it for the rest of the day!

What do you drink?

A whiskey sour is my go-to bar order without looking at a drinks menu, but last summer it was all about negronis.

Your favourite restaurant in Ireland?

Chapter One on Parnell Square in Dublin is one of the best representations of modern-Irish food, and I look forward to any time I can eat there. Also, I recently had dinner in Uno Mas on Aungier Street, and it was one of the best meals I’ve had in Ireland in a long time.

And abroad?

I love Gjelina in Venice in LA, probably one of the best examples of great

Californian food. “One of the best meals I’ve ever had was on a plastic stool in Hanoi”

What’s your sweet treat?

Orange and cardamom polenta cake.

What do you refuse to eat?

Salted liquorice, my wife’s favourite pick-and-mix choice from Sweden. Vile!

Are you careful about what you eat?

My approach has always been to find some element of balance to what I eat. Because of the nature of the job, I try a lot of food and I rarely rule out trying something new, so I do have to be a bit more strict with what I eat. We do a lot of meal planning and batch cooking which helps with that.

What’s your perfect family meal?

The cheat’s “roast” chicken dinner from my new book, Super Food in Minutes. I’ve been making variations on this one-pan chicken dinner for years, and it’s an incredibly simple recipe that gives you all the best bits of a roast-chicken dinner, cooked in half the time. ‘Donal’s Super Food in Minutes’ by Donal Skehan is published by Hodder in hardback, €25