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Stir it up Nigella Lawson believes in a no-nonsense approach

Nigella’s culinary odyssey began with a “restaurant column for the Spectator. When I was writing the column, I used to find that cooking was a very good way of letting my thoughts simmer. I then did a television show and it kind of took off, but it was never a really planned career move.”

Nigella whose shows “Nigella Bites” and “Forever Summer with Nigella” have been super popular, finds the bond between culture and food fascinating. “What is very interesting about the human culture was we all used food to signify that an occasion had importance in our life.”

The mum of two is an advocate of “unplanned cooking. I just open the fridge and see what I have leftover or what’s there and I can just cook in a very relaxed way.”

The super chef’s “Nigella Express”, being aired on Discovery Travel and Living, tells the secret of eating healthy on the go. As she says: “I spent quite a bit of time in Italy when I was growing up and I still go there every year. In a way, that suits modern life because Italian cooking is generally pretty fast. It relies on things that can be assembled very quickly, which can be helpful. I cook pretty widely because I just enjoy playing with lots of different ingredients.”

Ask her about her kind of food is and she says, “But I think my food really is it’s kind of a spontaneous kind of a thing. I just go with the flow. I’m not enormously structured. I mean obviously by the time it gets to be a recipe, I am. But of course, the real thing about cooking is that it’s only in baking that you have to be very, very contained and structured because that is really much more of a chemical formula.”

Ask her if there is a food she does not like and the Oxford graduate (with a degree in Medieval and Modern Languages!) says: “I am a greedy person that there is nothing I really dislike. The only thing I dislike is soy milk, but that’s the only thing I dislike.”

Nigella differentiates between a cook and a chef when she says: “The temperaments are different. On the whole, the great chefs tend to thrive on conflict. Whereas I think if you’re a home cook, you’re someone who wants harmony.”

Talking about the difference between her and other cookery show hosts on telly, Nigella says: “I suppose that I’m not a chef and most people are chefs on television. So I don’t have any brilliant techniques and I don’t chop a carrot at 100 miles an hour. I try and talk a lot in the sense that I think that food is very much a part of life.”

Nigella, who has been featured on Sexiest Women lists, is amused by the label.

“I’m getting on in years, so it’s very amusing to get that. But I think the difficulty about television is it glamorises to a certain extent. I think that I would have found it very difficult if I had been 20 doing this because I would have found that attention awkward and it would have made me feel self-conscious. But now, I just take it like it’s a bit of a joke. I’m flattered and I think it’s quite funny. For a long time, most of my career, I was a journalist. What I loved about that - I did a lot of radio - is you lived off what came out of your brain, rather than what you looked like.”

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