Never mind fiddly recipes – the pleasure of cooking, says Rachel Khoo, lies in keeping things simple.
When Rachel Khoo needed to record the voiceover for her new cooking show, lockdown woes meant that booking a high-tech sound booth was out of the question. Instead, she had to crawl under her duvet with her laptop.
“It was nuts,” she laughs. “It was so hot that I had to do it in my sports bra and shorts because I got so sweaty...”
If that sounds a touch chaotic, you’d never guess from the final result. Beautifully shot in her Swedish kitchen, Rachel Khoo’s Simple Pleasures is as slick as you’d expect from the sunny food writer and cook.
And whether she’s plucking windowsill herbs to flavour her pesto cake bites, zhushing up a salad with frozen peas and a Granny Smith, or transforming leftovers into a stuffing for crispy dumplings, Rachel’s recipes aren’t just simple, they’re inspirational.
“I really wanted to share that magic you can create with a couple of ingredients that you can probably find in the back of your cupboard,” she says. “Or if you don’t have one ingredient, you can change it for something else: I do meringue kisses with chickpea water instead of eggs, and I make flour out of blitzed-up oats.
“It’s showing tips and tricks that are really easy, so people can learn something new, but at the same time find that pleasure in cooking.”
And pleasure without the faff. For the 39-year-old, who lives with her Swedish husband and two small children, mealtimes have recently taken a practical turn: “It’s all about getting it onto the table quickly and efficiently before there’s a meltdown,” she says, laughing again. “Today I made a vegetarian curry, because I had a sad-looking aubergine and some tired courgettes, and that’s how I work, really. I look in the fridge, and go ‘Right, what can I use up?’”
Rachel’s resourcefulness stems from her Croydon childhood, where she grew up with her younger brother, her waste-hating Austrian mum (“throwing away food was the biggest sin”), and her Malay-Chinese father.
Not surprisingly, her diet was eclectic: “We had a lot of stir fries and beef rendang curry, but then my mum would make schnitzel, and we always had a Sunday roast. Monday was ‘leftover night’, and it would be like the United Nations on the table – a real hotchpotch of flavours.
“I was always very envious of my best friend, who’d have fish fingers and chips, but now I think what an amazing opportunity my parents gave me, to have such a diverse culinary upbringing.”
It wasn’t until she studied art at Central St Martins that Rachel started cooking herself and her friends, whipping up recipes by Nigel or Nigella that she’d torn out of the newspaper.
It soon became a passion. She started assisting a food stylist on photographic shoots, and hoped to do it professionally, “but if you wanted to get into food styling you had to work for free, and that wasn’t an option. I had to pay bills.”
Instead she worked in PR for two years, and saved up to do a Cordon Bleu patisserie course in Paris. “I thought OK, I can learn French and, if the food thing doesn’t work out, I’ll be able to speak English, German and French, and I can get a job as a trilingual secretary.”
The ‘food thing’ did work out. Rachel started running baking classes and was commissioned to write two cookbooks. With her eye on a third, she came up with an ingenious way of funding her recipe testing and avoiding waste: by setting up a table-for-two in her tiny flat, and trying her dishes out on guests who’d book via social media.
Word of mouth quickly spread, and her ‘Little Paris Kitchen’ became a hot ticket. “I had people coming from all over the world,” she recalls. “I’m so fortunate nothing awful happened, inviting strangers into my home. Now I’m a parent I know what anguish my parents must have been going through!”
In 2012 The Little Paris Kitchen morphed into a hit BBC Two series. Since then Rachel has written four more cookbooks and become a TV regular – most recently showing Fred Sirieix the culinary gems of Vienna in BBC Two’s Remarkable Places to Eat.
But nothing pleases her more than inspiring others to create something extraordinary from ordinary ingredients. “I always feel deeply humbled when somebody takes the time to cook one of my recipes,” she says. “It makes me very, very happy.”
::Rachel Khoo’s Simple Pleasures, Thursdays at 9pm, Food Network and dplay
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in July 2020 (c) Waitrose