Find the joy in food
ELLA WALKER TALKS TO FOOD WRITER MELISSA HEMSLEY ABOUT BORROWING HER MUM’S RECIPES AND TAKING THE PRESSURE AND GUILT FROM COOKING
MELISSA HEMSLEY is quite probably the reason your kitchen contains a spiralizer.
She and her elder sister, Jasmine, food caterersturned-Vogue bloggers and cookbook writers Hemsley + Hemsley (The Art Of Eating Well, Good + Simple), pioneered the thing.
Now, London-based Melissa is branching out alone, with her debut solo recipe collection, Eat Happy.
“Every time I say it I have to do jazz hands,” says the 32-year-old with a laugh.
What are her recipes trying to achieve?
THE crux of the book is to make cooking as simple and stressfree as possible. “What are people’s main objections to cooking?” she considers. “It takes too long: OK, I can make it take 30 minutes.”
She’s also tackling mountains of washing up (only one pan), soggy leftovers for packed lunches, having to shop around (ingredients you can get in a corner shop) and getting more veg in ‘without putting on another pan to boil a bit of broccoli’.
Ease aside, the book is underpinned by an acute awareness of food waste and its implications. “I grew up with an army dad and a Filipino-Catholic mum; very, very thrifty and frugal, don’t waste a single grain of rice, always be prepared for a war, that sort of mentality,” Melissa explains.
Why is it important to factor in leftovers?
SHE reckons taking responsibility for wasting food is something we’re more conscious of than ever. “You feel awful doing it. On the positive side, you feel amazing using stuff up. It’s really satisfying.”
She’s always looking for nifty ways to transform leftovers into dishes that are as ‘special’ as their original incarnation. “Say you have leftover sweet potato wedges or roast squash, you might think, ‘Oh, this is quite boring’, but fry them with butter and harissa spice and suddenly they’re incredible,” she buzzes. It’s part of what makes Eat Happy a Melissa book, not a Hemsley + Hemsley book, as well as the fact Melissa’s taste buds are firmly in charge. “For instance, I haven’t got a massive sweet tooth (although she does recommend her banoffee pie in a glass),” she explains. “I LOVE a takeaway. I don’t often feel great when I eat one; they don’t quite hit the spot, so I have recipes for a chicken katsu curry, a pad Thai, a buckwheat pizza.”
You can’t beat sharing family recipes
THERE are, she says, still “lots of nods to Jas and my mum” in the book though. “I’m eking out, recipe by recipe, book by book, my mum’s secret Filipino recipes. She’s very proud when we reference her, but I’ve got to say, getting a recipe from my mum is the hardest, because she changes it every time she makes a dish.”
Why do we need to ease up on ourselves in the kitchen?
MELISSA is utterly opposed to the current culture of guilt around food. “We don’t always have to have Instagrammable food, we don’t always get our nine portions of fruit and veg and it’s important not to feel guilty about it.”
Hence she’ll happily post truthfully captioned pictures to Instagram: “I’ll say, ‘Before you notice, that bit is burnt’, or, ‘I overcooked my yolk there’.”
She doesn’t agree with cutting out food groups and depriving yourself, either. “I’m not a big fan of extremes,” she says. “I love a positive goal and things that make me feel happy - like, ‘Clear that cupboard out’, but I don’t say, ‘I’m going to change everything about myself’.”
Instead of going on a crash diet, or bullying yourself into a month without alcohol or meat, she says, why not make an effort to fill up your freezer with home-cooked meals once a month instead? Use your ingredients in a different way, or buy less to begin with and meal-plan – ‘and then go spend that money you’ve saved on a dress – that’s what I’d do!’
Eat Happy: 30-minute Feelgood Food by Melissa Hemsley, photography by Issy Croker, is published by Ebury Press, priced £20.