Nadiya’s British Food Adventure
BBC TWO, 8.30PM
Nadiya Hussain won the nation’s hearts along with The Great British Bake Off crown back in 2015, and boosted her popularity further with the superb Chronicles of Nadiya last year, a thoughtful foodie travelogue exploring her family heritage in Bangladesh.
Though she’ll be back again later in the year with the much-anticipated Big Family Cooking Showdown (the BBC’S replacement for GBBO since its defection to Channel 4), this eight-part series is her first proper cookery show, as such. In it Hussain tours Britain meeting food producers who “go the extra mile”, whipping up tasty titbits using their produce. And again, it is a delight, not least because of the quick, half-hour format and relative simplicity of the recipes. She gets things off the ground tonight by baking some rather moreish looking cheese and chive scones, before putting together a fivespice vegetable curry using asparagus that she’s picked herself from a farm in Oxford. After that, it’s a mouth-watering rarebit cooked with haddock she’s learnt to home smoke from an enterprising fireman, and her own sumptuous take on Eton Mess. Cheerful and easy. Gerard O’donovan