Listen up boys and girls. Nadiya Hussain is your new quarantine cooking queen. The six episodes of her series, Nadiya’s Time to Eat, contain everything you need to know to make easy on-the-go lunches, satisfy your sugar cravings, feed your family of five, and even throw a summer barbecue. (Not that any of us are doing that at the moment.)
The series, a BBC production which aired in the UK between July and August of last year, is now available to stream on Netflix, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Just as parents are run off their feet. Just as all of us are now cooking more than we ever have. A series that streamlines and simplifies is precisely what we need.
Nadiya, who you will likely know from The Great British Bake Off, is an absolute delight. There is an eager energy about her. She is knowledgeable, passionate, and curious. And here, she channels all of that into demystifying the act of cooking.
Her focus, as the title implies, is in the eating. Remember that the show is called Nadiya’s Time to Eat, not “Nadiya’s Time to Cook”. Her mission is to make your life easier. She knows that you’re busy. She knows that the last thing you want to do after a long day is spend hours in the kitchen. She knows she can help. Because every minute less spent cooking is a minute more you have for yourself and for your family. It’s quite the subversive idea. A cooking show that wants you to spend as little time as possible cooking.
Nadiya moves through every episode like a woman possessed. Like someone with a compulsive urge to share everything she knows and everything she’s learnt. She’s cracked the code. She’s figured it out. And she wants to let you in on it.
Delicious food doesn’t have to be difficult, and Nadiya uses every cheat and shortcut at her disposal to show you how to conquer your kitchen. From using canned baked beans to make falafels, to a gorgeous chocolate chip cookie that you cook-up on your stove in a frying pan, this is a show that tells you not to waste your life making filo pastry when you can buy it from any supermarket. God knows it’s cheaper and tastes just as good.
If you’re someone who is intimidated by the idea of having to whip up a meal, you’d be glad to know that Nadiya doesn’t weigh down her recipes with jargon. She doesn’t tell you to brunoise fruit or julienne carrots. She just wants you to chop the onions up and throw them in the salad. I should say that all of this, in no way, dumbs down the art of cooking. What Nadiya does, like all good teachers, is take complex ideas and make them comprehensible.
But the thing I love most about this series is just how much of it there is. Every one of its six episodes is absolutely packed full of information. In just 30 zippy minutes, we get (at least) four recipes, we pay a visit to someone who needs a culinary consult, and we’re taken on the television equivalent of a school trip to find out where the food we love so much comes from. I now know how mushrooms are farmed, how golden syrup is made, and that only four people in the whole world know the recipe to that delicious tomato sauce in every can of Heinz baked beans.
It is astounding how well made this series is. It is so efficient in the way it conveys information. It is so cleverly produced and tightly edited that every minute is there because it needs to be.
Growing up, I was obsessed with this Canadian cooking show called Cooking with the Urban Peasant. Or rather, I developed an odd preoccupation with its host. Every episode would open with this toady theme song, where Dee Daniels, in her breathiest, sexiest voice, would croon: “Oh James, how do you do the things that you do? I still can’t believe that it’s true, I get hungry when I think of you.”
James Barber wasn’t your average celebrity chef. A kindly, heavyset, bearded, older gentleman, he was the very antithesis of Stephen Yan – the other Canadian export I was obsessed with as a kid. He was a little lethargic. He was sloppy and absentminded. His knife skills looked downright dangerous. And I don’t think I ever saw him wash his hands. Not once.
Looking back, I have no idea if he was actually a genius chef, schlubbing it up for the rest of us, or the other way around.
His schtick, however, was what got to me. It was rooted in the notion that cooking was easy. That it could be quick. Uncomplicated. There was no pomp or pretension. If all you had was a can of beans, then all you needed was a can of beans. He pushed the idea that there was nothing wrong with using what you had and what was available to you. Because the important thing was that the end product tasted good.
James Barber didn’t teach me how to cook, but he did instil in me the notion anyone could do it. Nadiya’s Time to Eat is a charming reminder of that fact.
Food is fuel. It needs to be tasty. It needs to be satisfying. This time at home has taught us how important it is for us to be cooks. Not chefs, but cooks. After years of watching Masterchef, where the harshest criticism from a judge is that a dish looks and tastes like “home cooking”, it is so refreshing to see a show embrace the idea of what it means to be a home cook. And do it with such gusto.
P.S. I may have also inadvertently invented the Nadiya’s Time to Eat drinking game. I dare you to take a shot every time she uses the words “fast”, “easy”, “quick”, “cheat”, or “shortcut”. You’ll be drunk by the end of the first episode. You’ll be blind by the end of the third.
Nadiya’s Time to Eat
Netflix, Season 1, 6 episodes
Cast: Nadiya Hussain
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