Relaxed, inspiring and as mouthwatering as ever, this cookery series with Nigella Lawson shows us that what and how we cook really can make us feel better and more alive. In this first episode, Nigella introduces us to recipes that are quick and calm.
There is Nigella’s favourite breakfast – a twist on avocado toast with radishes – as well as a deliciously different Thai noodle dish with cinnamon and prawns that was inspired by a recent holiday to Thailand, and a laid-back family supper of luscious lamb ribs with nigella and cumin seeds, served with a feta and avocado salad. To help wind down at the end of a hectic day, there’s some stove-side pottering with Nigella’s warm spiced cauliflower and chickpea salad. And a sweet treat comes in the form of a beautifully simple apricot almond cake.
Simply Nigella episode 1 recipes:
1. Warm spiced cauliflower and chickpea salad with pomegranate seeds
This is one of my favourite suppers, although there’s nothing that says you can’t serve this as a vegetable side. And you could also bolster it further by crumbling in some feta. But for me, it is perfect just as it is.
2. Apricot almond cake with rosewater and cardamom
This is my idea of a perfect cake: simple, beautiful, fragrant and beguiling. I’ve been making this sort of cake, in one form or another, since my clementine cake in How To Eat, and I can’t help but feel, with a certain calm excitement, that it has reached its apogee here.
3. Thai noodles with cinnamon and prawns
It’s not often that I eat something that tastes so different to anything I’ve come across before. But this is such a dish. A mesmerically talented chef called Tum cooked it when I was on holiday in Thailand last year, and I made him cook it again and again. I just had to share this spectacularly unfamiliar but compelling recipe with you. I hope you will be as bowled over by it as I was.