These recipes will be featured in her new cooking show, Cook, Eat Repeat
When the whole world went on lockdown last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, British chef and cookbook author Nigella Lawson made the most out of this difficult period dreaming up delicious new recipes that nourished her mind and body. And as the whole world slowly recovers from Covid-19, she will be sharing these creations in her new cooking show, Cook, Eat, Repeat, premiering on BBC Lifestyle (StarHub channel 432) and BBC Player on August 16.
Lawson shared that the six-episode series is a celebration of the power of food to transform every single day. "I think we all learned over lockdown that thinking about what to eat, cooking it, sitting down to what we’ve cooked, really gave a focus to our lives that we were grateful for," she explained, adding that the dishes she would be cooking "delve into the ingredients I love and recipes I always return to".
Borne during the pandemic, you will find that the recipes are created with home cooks in mind and can be easily replicated in their kitchens—from the crisp and addictive fried chicken sandwich to the creamy crab mac n' cheese. Here are three of her recipes to get you started.
Related: Adobo: Simple Home Recipe Of This Popular Filipino Dish
Mine-All-Mine Sweet and Salty Chocolate Cookies
Makes 2 large cookies
Ingredients
- 50g plain flour (or gluten-free plain flour)
- 10g cocoa
- 1/8 teaspoon baking powder (glutenfree if necessary)
- 1/8 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
- 1/8 teaspoon fine sea salt
- 50g soft unsalted butter (or dairy-free baking block if you want these to be vegan)
- 25g caster sugar
- 15g soft dark brown sugar
- ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
- 25g dark chocolate chips
- ¼ teaspoon sea salt flakes
Method
- Heat the oven to 180ºC/160ºC Fan, and get out a—preferably light-coloured—baking sheet. You don’t need to line it if it’s nonstick; otherwise, place a sheet of baking parchment on it.
- Stir the flour, cocoa, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and fine sea salt together in a small bowl just to combine them.
- In a slightly larger bowl—I use a pudding basin that I now can’t look at without thinking of these cookies—vigorously beat the butter, both the sugars and the vanilla with a small wooden spoon until you have a coloured and creamy mixture. If you aren’t a messy person, you could use a cereal bowl for this.
- Add a generous spoonful of the dry ingredients to the creamed butter and sugar and beat it in gently with your wooden spoon. Then, still gently, unless you want cocoa and flour all over the place – beat in the rest of your dry ingredients, in about three batches. Once the dry ingredients are absorbed, you can beat vigorously until you have a sticky, rich-brown dough, that clumps together, at which point you can stir in the chocolate chips.
- It’s not often I demand this level of precision, but I now weigh this mixture, and divide it in two; you don’t need to be fanatical about this, a few grams here or there won’t make the difference. Squidge each half in your hands to form two fat patties about 7cm in diameter and place them on your baking sheet, at least 10cm apart, as they spread while cooking.
- Sprinkle 1/8 teaspoon of sea salt flakes over each cookie, and bake in the oven for about 12 minutes, until the top of each biscuit is riven with cracks. At 10 minutes—which is when I start checking they will be utterly smooth, but in the next 2 minutes, they seem to transform themselves. I crouch by the oven, staring through the cloudy glass door feeling like, as the old Joan Rivers joke has it (and forgive me if you’ve heard me tell this before), Elizabeth Taylor shouting ‘Hurry!’ at the microwave.
- Once the surface is cracked, and the cookies have spread, they are ready. They will, however, feel very soft— even uncooked—to the touch, and you will doubt me. But I will forgive you, as long as you obey me. So whip out the baking sheet, leaving the cookies in place for 5.minutes. Only then may you slip a metal spatula under the cookies and tenderly transfer them to a wire rack. For optimal eating pleasure, leave for another 10 minutes before biting into one. I often succumb after 5, which is perfectly permissible, I feel, though I should warn you that the biscuit is unlikely to hold its shape by then. But in times of urgent need, such matters of form scarcely matter.