These recipes make cooking pleasurable and eating blissful
Banana skin curry anyone? Nigella Lawson is back with a new series. JANE HAASE finds out more
IT’S GETTING colder, the nights are getting darker and a lot of us are facing the prospect of more hours indoors for reasons unrelated to the season – so it seems like the perfect time for comfort food.
And few celebrity chefs make food seem as comforting as Nigella Lawson who is back with new series Cook, Eat, Repeat.
Nigella, 60, says of the show: ”It feels really lovely to be back. I’m lucky enough to work with a team I love, and have worked with forever.
“Of course, for all of us, there was a bit of culture shock at first, having been living and working remotely for so long suddenly finding ourselves on set, but after two days it felt like we had been doing it forever.”
She says they had to be careful to make the series Covid secure.
“The biggest difference from our usual set up is that we all had to keep two metres’ distance from one another and were reminded of this regularly – in the nicest possible way,” she says.
“Plus there was a two metre rod that could be brought out if at any time it looked as if we were inching towards one another.
“I think we were all grateful for the strict list of safety regulations. I have
to say I felt very protected by them. We couldn’t have our usual eating scenes with friends. But I made the supreme sacrifice and ate everything myself!”
Nigella says Cook, Eat,
Repeat is “a celebration of the power of food to transform every single day”.
“I think we all learnt over lockdown that thinking about what to eat, cooking it, sitting down to what we’ve cooked, really gave a focus to our lives that we were grateful for,” she says. “But the series is also a passion project, delving into the ingredients I love, the recipes I always return to, and the pleasure of cooking and eating.”
Dishes Nigella will be serving up include a spicy broth with noodles, a fried chicken sandwich, brown butter colcannon and meatballs with a difference.
She adds there will also be: “My new favourite thing to cook with fish fingers, crab mac’n’cheese, fearfree fish stew, and so many recipes to make your cooking pleasurable and eating blissful!”
And for those with a sweet tooth you have Nigella’s chocolate peanut butter cake, Basque burnt cheesecake, rice pudding cake, and a luscious creme caramel. Not one for waste, Nigella is also making a curry using banana skins…
“I can’t bear throwing anything away!” she says. “And when I found out that you could eat banana skins, I couldn’t get in the kitchen fast enough.
“It’s a revelation.”
The TV chef continues that lockdown did allow people to get more confident with cooking.
“I think the reason a lot of people are nervous about cooking is they think there is one perfect way and they are frightened of getting it wrong. Lockdown showed people who don’t consider themselves confident cooks, that cooking is all about improvisation. It gave them confidence.
“You are not talking about making showstoppers; you are talking about cobbling things together to make supper!”
Nigella: Cook, Eat, Repeat starts on Monday, on
BBC2, at 8pm