Recipes for disaster
Nadia Sawalha and Kaye Adams tell ELLA WALKER that even the worst chefs among us can learn to cook
ON the front cover of Nadia Sawalha and Kaye Adams’ new cookbook, Disaster Chef, the Loose Women presenters are mid food-fight.
“That was a bad idea,” says Kaye, 55, shaking her head (“That was so fun!” Nadia, 53, shouts over her). “I really cannot recommend cold noodles in your cleavage.”
Best friends for more than two decades, the women have taken the worlds of YouTube and food by storm. Their lack of artifice, whether on telly or on their online channel, is crucial, and without the latter, there’d be no cookbook.
The pair are bona fide “middle-aged social-media sensations” – despite their kids’ initial protestations (they have two daughters apiece).
They started cooking together because “Kaye really was, there’s no doubt about it, disaster chef”, explains Nadia, who won Celebrity MasterChef in 2007 and has a slew of her own cookbooks already. Kaye pulls her phone out and scrolls to a picture of a brown flip-flopshaped mess that is apparently ‘pitta con funghi’ (“We should definitely film people’s reactions to it,” says Nadia, with another cackle).
They started posting Kaye’s not-so appetising dishes on Facebook and realised a lot of people could relate – cooking on camera became a no-brainer, and the book brings everything together.
Disaster Chef is about the ‘building blocks’ of cooking.
“I’m not cheffy at all, I’m only a home cook. I’ve never done caramel baskets or anything, but Kaye made me realise that not everyone knows what it means when you say, ‘Fry the onions until they’re transparent’,” says ex-EastEnders actress, Nadia.
Disaster Chef is full of “real food, to get you through life”, says Glasgow-based Kaye, and is peppered with basic tips and tricks from Nadia – from getting your steak out of the fridge half an hour before cooking it so it won’t be tough, to tipping your drained potatoes back into the hot pan to dry out before mashing them. Stuff she’d assumed people knew, before Stirlingshire-born Kaye pointed out that we don’t all have the “building blocks to jump in there”.
But Kaye is learning. “She made this,” says Nadia, pointing at the book’s berry pavlova recipe. “We didn’t have any home ecs, or stylists. We cooked the food in the house and my husband took the photos.
“I’m well proud of her – but anyone can make that. If you do every single one of these things, you will create that; simple as that,” she says, stabbing the instructions on the page for emphasis.
“Without those specific instructions,” says Kaye, “I’d think, ‘Well this is a disaster, I can’t make a pavlova, I’m a rubbish cook’, and walk to Waitrose, whereas it’s a lovely moment when you follow something and it works. You think, ‘Wow’.”
Feeding your family can still be a hassle – whether you love cooking or not though.
For Kaye, despite her improvements, cooking will always be something of a chore. “Even if I get better at it, it’s not going to be the thing that makes me relax and calm down,” she says. “At the end of the day, the kids need to be fed, it’s another thing that ‘needs to be done’.” But for Nadia, the kitchen is her happy place. “My husband will say, ‘You’ve had a really hard day, don’t be silly, we’ll get a takeaway’”, she says. “No! I’ve had a really stressful day, so I want to cook!”
“But just because I can cook doesn’t mean I want to be using 20 different ingredients and spending two hours in the kitchen every night – I don’t, I want to bang it on the table and I want everyone to shut up and eat it.”
NADIA And Kaye Disaster Chef by Nadia Sawalha and Kaye Adams, photography by Mark Adderley, is published by DK, priced £20.