“You could have the best food in the world, but if you come to the table all stressed out, they will only remember that you were a terrible host. … People will always forgive you for serving simple food, but they will never forgive you for being obnoxious.”

I think for that, let's say you like things that you've had and haven't cooked before. And because you go to a restaurant, you said, I tried this thing in a restaurant and it was really good. And try and make the simple version of it. And there will be a lot of recipes online for everything. It really is endless because you can find anything online. And try to find the one thing you really loved at a restaurant and make it many times and until you get it right. And that just bit by bit, add things to your repertoire that you feel like you feel comfortable with cooking. I'm always thinking about what people, what are the, what are people, what do people tell themselves when they don't cook something? They tell themselves, oh, this is not for me. Often people say to me, this is not for me. I don't bake because, oh, I can't be fussed about like all this measuring and always over or under bake it and etc. I'm just not a baker or I don't make desserts. And in a way, I think it's absolutely fine. If this is something you don't feel like you want to do, don't do it. But there's so many versions of baking which do not involve what you think is baking. Like it's one of the easiest things in the world. And I always do that for dinner parties when I want to be super quick. I take some meringue that I bought in the shop and I make, I roast a fruit. If you've got strawberries, you just need to take a punnet of strawberries, chop off the stems and put them in the oven with some sugar. And when they come out nice and warm, you serve them over the meringue with ice cream and whipped cream. That's no cooking. That's just a tray of strawberries that gone in the oven. All the rest is stuff you bought. And it feels so luxurious. Of course, you can add mint to your roasted strawberries and a cinnamon stick or star anesthetic. You can put one teaspoon of orange blossom or something aromatic that adds a little bit of flavor to it. You can always go for vanilla as well, but you can add something a bit different and add that two tablespoons of pomegranate molasses to your roasted strawberries and it blows your mind. But it doesn't need to be like that. You can actually bake or make a dessert whilst not measuring a thing. It's totally fine. We have a recipe in the book for, we call it butternut parmigiana. So, you know, the parmigiana, the eggplant dish. That's a lot of work. Everybody that has had that in an Italian restaurant goes, knows, or anyone who's tried making it to slice your eggplant, you need to fry each piece. You need to make your tomato sauce. You need to layer it. You need to put the cheese. It's a good hour and a half of work. Worth it, I think. It's delicious. But if you don't have the time or the energy or the inclination, there's a problem. You're not going to have it. In the book, we do. Decided to take the kind of the parmigiana vibe and we do what we call a butternut parmigiana. So effectively, it is a butternut squash, cheap and cheerful vegetable that you cut into wedges, skin on, and you put it on a tray and you roast it just by just on its own, effectively with some olive oil and seasoning and it softens. And that's no work because that's just thyme. And whilst the butternut is cooking, you make a tomato sauce, but you don't make a tomato sauce that you cook. You just take some tomatoes that you chop up or grate or blitz up together with quite a lot of olive oil and garlic and some dried oregano. I don't remember exactly what's in it. And that goes in on the bottom at the right thickness and it cooks under the butternut squash. And then we take thick slices of cheese. We use teleggio. Tellegio is this really pungent Italian cheese that gives you so much because it's it really is pungent, but you can use something slightly milder like brie. And we almost coat every piece of butternut with that brie or teleggio. And teleggio melts beautifully. It's got the perfect melting quality and coats every one of these butternut pieces with cheese while the sauce cooks itself. And there's some breadcrumbs on there as well to give you a bit of texture. And it really gives you the parmigiana vibe because there's cheese, there's tomato sauce, there's a roasted vegetable, and it's 10% of the work. And people look at it and go, oh, that's fancy. It's fancy because you couldn't imagine yourself making something with those flavors if you're not, if you hadn't done it before. But it's not fancy if once you've done it, you can do it with your blindfolded next time because the only bit that is a little bit hard is cutting the butternut because butternuts are quite hardy. But once you've done that, cut it into wedges, all the rest is done in the oven or a mixing bowl.

And when people come over for a dinner party, they're not giving you a score based on how much work you did.

I'm curious if you had, as you were putting this book together, were there rules like how much time things could take or how long the prep or the number of ingredients? What defines simple?

Yeah, it's a really good question. So in the previous book, we had very, in the first simple, we had very clear parameters and they're very easily coded in the book. So we had categories like under 30 minutes, under 10 ingredients, the make ahead, pantry cooking. So we broke it down into all the bits that would make people think that it's simple, right? But in this book, we didn't formalize it in such a way, but all these categories still work. So we have, I think one of the things that people perceive as hard work is working, doing multiple tasks, like having a roasting tray, a saucepan in which you cook the sauce, and another one in which you boil the pasta. So we try to, as much as possible, cook in one pan. And I think more than 50% of the recipes in the book are cooked in one pan. So that is definitely one thing that one idea of simple. The amount of time that things take to cook, yes, again, I think most recipes are done easily within half an hour. The list of ingredients, it's small. If it goes above 10, then we really think whether that's justified. But vast majority of the ingredient list would be 10 or 8 or 6 or even 4 on occasion ingredients. So anything that you will allow people to just feel like, okay, we can, I can cook because I just want to use my pantry or I can cook because I just have half an hour or I can cook because I really don't want to do much dishes. I just want to cook everything in one pan. I want to eat from the pan so I don't even need plates. Even that's a possibility with some of those recipes.

Is there a flavor combination or an ingredient combination in this book that just particularly delights you?