Good for you: Bestselling author Melissa Hemsley on why we need to eat up
EVERY single struggle you encounter in the kitchen, Melissa Hemsley has already been there and had to
troubleshoot it.
The 32-year-old Londoner, who once knocked both Jamie Oliver and Mary Berry off the top of the book charts, has also managed to demystify ‘healthy eating’ in her new book, Eat Happy: 30-Minute Feelgood Food.
“You hear the word healthy and some people will think ‘bland’, ‘boring’, ‘misery-making’, ‘expensive’, and ‘hard to get the ingredients’. A whole list of negatives,” says Hemsley.
“Or they’ll think ‘I’ll do it coming up to the summer’ or ‘I’ll do it to punish myself in January’ or ‘I’ll do it if I need to slim down for a wedding’. And I am not any of those things. I don’t count calories. I don’t diet. And I don’t think ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, ‘gorge’ nor ‘deprive’. None of those things. You don’t need to.
“I just know what makes me feel good,” says Hemsley, sipping a fresh ginger tea.
Before writing her new book, not only did she consider all of the reasons people don’t cook, she also sat back and reflected on how people want to feel after they have eaten.
“If you ask anyone how do they want to feel after a meal they would say, ‘I want to feel satisfied. I want to feel uplifted, energised’. If they’re eating at the end of the day they’ll want to feel comforted and content and rested. Nobody wants to feel crap after a meal so why do we let ourselves quite a lot of the time?
“Throughout the book, I’ve got lots of fake-aways, my healthy take on takeaways. I think about all the food that I crave so I have chicken wings or chicken nuggets or pizzas, so all these things that feel familiar but why can’t you eat something that hits the spot but actually has some vegetables in it or has more whole ingredients?
Hemsley consciously chose 30 minutes as the length of time it takes to cook each of her 120 recipes for a number of reasons.
“I said, ‘what can I do to make life as easy as possible’, so I said to myself, ‘30 minute works’. It works because in 30 minutes it’s quicker than getting a takeaway, everyone’s got 30 minutes, and you can just about hold off hunger for 30 minutes,” she says.
As well as her recipes taking 30 minutes, the majority of them require you use just one pan or pot, so as to cut down on the washing up.
She has essentially created a cookbook for the person who thinks ‘it’s too hard’ to cook from a recipe on a regular school night.
And so she broke down each recipe into five steps or less. “The method is super simple. To be honest, most of my cooking is throw it all in,” she says.
As well as underselling her style of cooking, Melissa says she is neither a chef nor a nutritionist and is at pains to point out that people do not need to be turned off cooking for themselves just because they do not have either of those qualifications.
“We have almost got so far into loving chefs and food that we forget that we are perfectly capable of cooking for ourselves and you don’t need to know every flavour combination, you don’t need to know about every cut of meat, you don’t need to be an expert in food in order to feed yourself.
“I am not a chef and I am not a nutritionist and I don’t claim to be either.”
While Hemsley may make her recipes and book sound quite simplistic, it is because of the consideration and preparation she herself put into the book.
For example, each and every one of her 120 recipes has been heavily road-tested by at least five people. This means that each of her testers was given a recipe and its method and asked to find, buy, and prepare the ingredients and eat the finished product.
They were then asked questions like ‘how easy was it to find the ingredients?’
There was one question in particular that made the recipe a make-or-break: ‘Would you be bothered eating this again?’
If her tester said ‘no’, then that recipe was cut from the book.
When Melissa isn’t cooking meals that take less than 30-minutes she’s using her slow cooker.
“When people say they can’t cook, I’m like chuck it in the slow cooker mate. You don’t need to cook. Let your kitchen work for you. Let your freezer work for you, throw it in the freezer.
“Why have we made it so complicated for ourselves? Just throw things in a pan and as long as you don’t burn it, you can save any recipe.”
