The longest I’ve gone without a panic attack is about two months. Even then I can feel it bubbling away under the surface.
Give me buttered white bread with Marmite crisps and salad cream and I’m a happy girl.
In an average week I’ll be testing recipes, doing a voice-over, filming and writing. I cram everything in Monday to Friday because I refuse to give up the weekend.
Once a month we have ‘dessert for dinner’ night. I’ll make four separate desserts. They’ll come home from school and eat as much cake and custard and ice cream as they can physically get in their guts. Because sometimes I think, let them just be children.
My mum was slightly disgruntled with cooking and being in the kitchen.
It’s taken me three years to learn that just because I work in the food industry, it doesn’t mean that I have to eat every minute of every day.
I take everything out of the fridge and see what we can make. We talk about what we could possibly create, and if there is something on the turn that we could save, we chop it up and put it in the freezer.
When I’m trying to get bread to prove, I am itching; I am so impatient.
I first met my husband on the day we got married, when I was 20. I moved to be with him in Leeds, 165 miles from Luton. The kitchen was absolutely tiny. But I got my first hand-held mixer and first set of scales and first blue cake tin from Tesco and that was very exciting.
I’m a morning person so I like to be up by 6 am to wash and pray before the sun rises, and then have a tea at the kitchen table.
Pot Noodles are my true love because I don’t have to cook them. I have a ritual: take one pot noodle, add a teaspoon of chilli flakes and half of salt, plus all the seasoning it comes with.
If I break my finger, I go to accident and emergency. If I have a cold, I go to the pharmacy. If I'm broken inside, where do I go? So, to help myself heal, I felt the best way to do this would be to talk, to share and to better understand what it is that I have.
I feel like there’s a dignity in silence and I think if I retaliate to negativity with negativity then we’ve evened out. And I don’t need to even that out because if somebody’s being negative, I need to be the better person.
I spent a lot of time with extended family when I was young. Every weekend, Dad would buy half a sheep and Mum would cook for about 50 people, and we would all eat on the couch, in the kitchen, spilling out into the garden.
When I get back from a mid-morning stroll, I’ll do some writing then I’ll typically spend the day testing new recipes.
How my parents are in the kitchen is a good indicator of their parenting style. Mum cooks for sustenance, wants to get in and out, the job done quickly. My Dad wants to prance around in the kitchen, create a curry - and a mess - and entertain everyone.
