This week, Gilly is with Claire Dinhut aka Condiment Claire. Claire is a culinary history cook and the author of The Condiment Book . A dual national of the US and France, she splits her time between LA and her family home, a mill in the French countryside where the rituals, traditions and flavours of both have inspired her till-side treasure, The Condiment Book which is bound to fly off the shelves this Christmas. Check out Gilly’s Substack for Extra Bites of Claire who’s taken us to that mill ...
Nov 28, 2024•26 min•Season 24Ep. 8
This week, you may be surprised to find a fashion designer on the show. But Alice Robinson is not what you might imagine. She’s only just left the Royal College of Art, but her work has already been featured in the V&A ‘s Food: Bigger than the Plate exhibition. Her first book Field, Fork, Fashion has had her on Radio’s 4’s Start the Week to discuss our connection with the countryside - with James Rebanks among the other guests. She is an extraordinary advocate of our connection with the land...
Nov 21, 2024•40 min•Season 24Ep. 7
This week, Gilly's with Jon Watts, the author of the instant Sunday Times Bestseller Speedy Weeknight Meals . He's a chef with 885k followers on Instagram, but it all started when as a teenager serving a six and a half year sentence for GBH in a young offenders institution, he was given a job on day release at one of the early Jamie Oliver restaurants. Now in this mid 30s, he says that it was the Duke of Edinburgh's Award which taught him to cook in prison that changed his life - he was the firs...
Nov 14, 2024•32 min•Season 24Ep. 6
This week, Gilly is with new kid on the block in cookbookland, Emily Roz. Emily is a trained chef, a recipe developer, and the content creator behind Myriad Recipes. Her “Around the World in 80 Dumplings” series went viral, gaining millions of views. They caught up to talk about The World is Your Dumpling , which has over 80 recipes celebrating the diverse flavours and textures of dumplings from just about everywhere across the globe. Iasked her if writing about dumplings was a great excuse to t...
Nov 07, 2024•24 min•Season 24Ep. 7
This week, Gilly is with another changemaker, Elliot Webb, the author of Growing Mushrooms at Home: The Complete Guide to Knowing, Growing and Loving Fungi on the awesome world beneath our feet. The founder of Urban Farm It is a passionate grower and educator of alternative agriculture based in the UK. His goal is become a leader in the global movement to a more sustainable and self-sufficient society by positively disrupting current food production culture. Gilly asks him to dig deep into the h...
Oct 31, 2024•31 min•Season 24Ep. 5
This week, Gilly's with the man who’s on a mission to put flavour in the heart of a revolution in the food system. Franco Fubini is the CEO and founder of sustainable food distributor, Natoora. He’s also one of the judges of The Food Planet prize for innovation in food, and now, the author of In Search of the Perfect Peach. His philosophy is simple but its impact could be massive - He believes that our everyday food choices can and should make our diet healthier, tastier with a massive impact on...
Oct 24, 2024•34 min•Season 24Ep. 4
This week, Gilly continues to curate the changemakers with chef, author and co-founder of Leon, Allegra McEved y In Chefs Wanted , she’s on a mission to teach kids not just to play with their food but to cook like the pros. It’s a must-buy for any kids who want to be properly creative in the kitchen and stretch their skills. But Allegra has a deeper purpose behind everything she does, including this book; Gilly last met her at the Conflict Café in London where she was hosting a Lebanese pop up s...
Oct 17, 2024•33 min•Season 24Ep. 3
This week, Gilly is with Tim Spector, geneticist, author of Food For Life and founder of Zoe, the personalised nutrition app that has changed the way we think about food. And now, the Food for Life Cookbook . Since their first meeting for the delicious podcast before Covid changed the world, gut health advice is everywhere, and personalised nutrition is set to become the Next Big Thing. Gilly finds out the back story to Tim's extraordinary rise to fame and influence over the past four years, and...
Oct 10, 2024•33 min•Season 24Ep. 2
This week, Gilly is with one of the old skool TV chefs who taught Britain how to eat, Rick Stein They last met over lunch when she was chatting to him about his book Secret France for the delicious. podcast. This time, it’s about secret Britain, or at least the communities of Britain bursting with flavour and influencing our national diet. Rick Stein’s Food Stories, the book and the BBC show, is about all that we are in Britain and is a subject very close to Gilly's heart. She asks him, after tr...
Oct 03, 2024•27 min•Season 24Ep. 1
This week, Gilly is with food royalty, the restaurant critic, writer, and son of Queen Camilla, Tom Parker Bowles. Royal Food has always been about impressing the most powerful people in the world, and in his book Cooking and the Crown , he tells how it has set trends for centuries, from Victoria to his stepfather, King Charles 3rd. Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Tom Parker Bowles Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Sep 26, 2024•37 min•Season 23Ep. 42
Gilly is with Pam Brunton, chef/owner at Inver restaurant on Argyll and Bute, author, philosopher and star of Rick Stein’s Food Stories on BBC1. Her book, Between Two Waters: Heritage, landscape and the modern cook is a deep dive into everything that we need to know about food - the philosophy, the politics and the provenance of what we eat. It’s part memoir, part manifesto on the future of feeding the world, as well as a sharp, feminist critique of the power of the global food economy, and has ...
Sep 19, 2024•33 min•Season 23Ep. 41
This week, Gilly is with Saturday Kitchen regular and author of nine cook books, Claire Thomson, aka Five o Clock apron. Her latest book, Veggie Family Cook Book is, like Claire, what it says on the cover – genuine, real, easy-going, with 120 recipes to make life more interesting. Gilly finds what makes her so appealing - and enduring - in the plentiful world of cookbooks. Pop over to Gilly’s Substack for Extra Bites of Claire and a recipe for Spanakopita. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy ...
Sep 12, 2024•32 min•Season 23Ep. 40
This week, Gilly has her hands on on the brand new, much awaited book from Ottolenghi, Comfort. Written by the 'four hungries', Yotam, his original co-writer Tara Wigley, Helen Goh and Verena Lochmuller, these are the foods that provide a comfort blanket for them, and mark a departure from the big Ottolenghi books of the past. In a deliciously raw, often indiscreet chat with three of the 'hungries' while Yotam is out of the Zoom room, we learn what makes Ottolenghi Ottolenghi, the connected nost...
Sep 05, 2024•31 min•Season 23Ep. 39
This week, in the last of our summer holiday specials, we head to the Good Kitchen in Sicily with community chef and adventurer in all things good, Danny McCubbin. His story is one of a leap of faith, driven by a sense of purpose coursing through his veins and cultivated by his 17 years working with Jamie Oliver, including mentoring chefs at Fifteen who had come from challenging backgrounds. Gilly first met Danny at San Patrignano, an extraordinary rehabilitation community committed to building ...
Aug 29, 2024•34 min•Season 23Ep. 39
This week’s we’re off to the Med – yup, all of it - with chef, Ben Tish. Ben’s latest book Mediterra follows his deep dive into bits of the Mediterranean; Moorish looked at the influence of the moors over hundreds of years on food of the Med, while his book Sicilia was a visceral guide to the street and home food of Sicily. This time, he covers the whole Mediterranean – north, south, east, west to bring us the flavours that Greece has in common with France, Lebanon with Spain, Turkey with Egypt....
Aug 22, 2024•26 min•Season 23Ep. 38
This week, Gilly is with Meera Sodha, author of Made In India The Times’ book of the year in 2014, Fresh India, which won the 2017 Observer Food Monthly's Best New Cookbook Award, East which drew from her Guardian’s New Vegan column, and now Dinner, with a rather different story. This is about the food that helped her recovery from burn out, scribbled in her orange notebooks which, after three years of not being able to cook at all, she would cook only for pleasure. She talked to her just after ...
Aug 15, 2024•34 min•Season 23Ep. 37
This week, we’re back at Rockwater, Hove talking LIVE with Melissa Hemsley, food writer of six best-selling cook books, including her latest, the Sunday Times bestseller, Real Healthy. A delicious reminder of how to unprocess our diet with easy, everyday recipes, the book is an antidote to ultra processed foods. Gilly chats to Melissa about everyday activism, elevating the simplest of flavours and the recipe for joy. Click here for Extra Bites on Gilly's Substack including a recipe from the book...
Aug 08, 2024•46 min•Season 23Ep. 36
This week, we’re going back to London, 2002, a time before pomegranate molasses, when Nigella and Jamie were first on the telly and Ottolenghi had yet to chuck his flavour bombs into the salad bowl of British cuisine, to the publication of the very first Diana Henry book, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons. Click here for Gilly's previous chats with Diana about How to Eat a Peach and Roast Figs, Sugar Snow , but this time, we’re going back to a time when they were both TV producers, intoxicated by the ...
Aug 01, 2024•38 min•Season 23Ep. 35
This week, in the very first Cooking the Books LIVE at Rockwater in Hove, an audience with Guardian Feast columnist, Rachel Roddy. Rachel is the author of three books about her life in Italy including the multi award winning Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome which was first published in 2015 and now reissued in 2024. It’s the story of a 32 year old woman from Harpenden who turned up in Rome with little more than a travel toothbrush and a phone, planning to stay a month, may...
Jul 25, 2024•56 min•Season 23Ep. 34
This week, as the schools get ready for the long summer holidays, Gilly is with the woman everyone needs to pop in their suitcase if they’re heading to France, Carolyn Boyd, author of Amuse Bouche, How to Eat Your Way around France. Carolyn has guided Gilly through the best food destinations – and therefore THE best destinations in France for the last couple of years though her articles in The Guardian, The Times, National Geographic Traveller Food and BBC Good Food. And that includes a recent t...
Jul 18, 2024•25 min•Season 23Ep. 33
This week, we’re off to Seoul with British-Korean writer, Su Scott. Su has lived in Britain longer than she lived in Korea where she grew up, and has raised her own daughter in London. But her latest book, Pocha tells the story of the country she left behind, her family and the food they shared, often in the pochas, the covered markets and food stalls which are about so much more than food. Click here for Extra Bites of Su on Gilly's Substack Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more infor...
Jul 11, 2024•35 min•Season 23Ep. 32
This week, as the UK (and France) go to the polls, Gilly chats to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall about the best way to support the NHS, his latest book How to Eat 30 Plants a Week. Last time we met to talk about the River Cottage’s Good Comfort , his message was to swap out the less healthy ingredients for more, eating healthily not by taking stuff out of them, but by putting more in. This time, he’s upped his game and using the best of the latest science, he’s showing us how to eat 30 different pl...
Jul 04, 2024•31 min•Season 23Ep. 31
This week in an extra episode in the run up to the UK General Election to remind everyone why we must get the next government to fix the food system, Gilly meets Chris Van Tulleken, TV, radio and infectious diseases doctor who catapulted the term ultra processed food into the public consciousness in 2023 with his book Ultra Processed People. Now out in paperback, Gilly asks him about power, politics and the ultra processing food industry. Click here for Extra Bites of Chris on Gilly's Substack, ...
Jul 03, 2024•38 min•Season 23Ep. 30
This week, we’re with Giulia Crouch to look at the diet of the Blue Zones that will make us not only live long and healthy lives, but is the Happiest Diet in the World. A little known fact: the very first book Gilly wrote back in 1993 on the back of a Channel 4 series called Food File was The Mediterranean Health Diet: the delicious way to lose weight and live longer. The TV show and the book was about a village in Southern Italy which scientists had discovered best diet in the world – and the r...
Jun 27, 2024•31 min•Season 23Ep. 29
This week, we’re with Irish chef, Anna Haugh to talk about her first cookbook, Cooking with Anna . Anna is a massive part of the story of British food culture, leaving Dublin as a young woman to cook in the steamiest kitchens in London – Shane Osborn’s Pied a Terre, Philip Howard’s The Square and Gordon Ramsay’s London House. But in 2019, she opened her own, Myrtle in Chelsea, more than a nod – a deep bow to Myrtle Allen, the doyenne of Irish cuisine and the inspiration behind Darina Allen's leg...
Jun 20, 2024•30 min•Season 23Ep. 28
This week, we’re talking to friend of the show, Mark Diacono about his latest book, Vegetables . This is a book packed with ideas about how to get more from food from the land, a journey through the seasons which Ottolenghi calls 'simple, soulful, seasonal.' Bee Wilson calls it 'joyful', and Julius Roberts says it's 'an inspiring veg bible'. But for a gardener like Mark, it was Monty Don calling it 'a wonderful book, something truly inspiring and beautiful' that brought life to full circle. Head...
Jun 13, 2024•32 min•Season 23Ep. 27
In this special extra episode on the morning after the Guild of Food Writers Awards 2024, we leaf through some of the best food writing of the year in four of the 16 categories to explore what judges Laura Nickoll, Lyndon Gee, Kalpna Woolf and Fliss Freeborn were looking for in their shortlists. Click here for the Awards brochure and the full set of categories and nominees. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jun 13, 2024•24 min•Season 23Ep. 26
This week, we’ve been invited to a Chinese Banquet with the word on Chinese food, Fuchsia Dunlop. Her multi award winning book, Invitation to a Banquet is a huge and deep dive into Chinese life through the prism of food. After 30 years of writing about Chinese food culture, she has a seat at the table most of us can have no idea about. Click here to head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Fuchsia’s China. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jun 06, 2024•36 min•Season 23Ep. 25
This week, we’re off to the jungles of Colombia and... London with Modern Medicine Woman, Frankie Paz Her book Plant Feasts is about how to live in the concrete jungle or the madness of modern life with the wisdom of the ancients. It’s about slowing down and finding how to live – how to really live by connecting with friends, family and nature – even if, like her, you live in a city. Click here for Gilly's Substack to get Extra Bites of Frankie's wisdom for life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/p...
May 30, 2024•31 min•Season 23Ep. 24
This week, we’re off on an Italian road trip along the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea with Amber Guinness and her latest book Italian Coastal . We first met Amber a couple of years ago on Cooking the Books when she told us about her book A House Party in Tuscany , the story of restoring and reclaiming her childhood home . This time, she takes us to some of the hidden gems of her family holidays from Maremma to The Aeolian Islands, cooking up food and memories along the way. Head over to Gilly's Sub...
May 23, 2024•32 min•Season 23Ep. 23
