Jamie Oliver At Home

Skye Gyngell: 'I would hate to be considered a wally'

Petersham Nurseries on a sunny day is an approximation to heaven. Just a short walk along the Thames from Richmond, the nursery hides behind venerable Georgian brick walls. Inside, tasteful plants are everywhere. The greenhouses which contain Petersham’s now famous cafe are strewn with artfully mismatched chairs and tables balanced on an uneven gravel floor. There’s even a central-casting smiling vicar in the church next door to make this the perfect spot for buying a geranium or an expensive lunch.

I can’t say much about the food, sadly, because it is mid-morning and the day’s treats are still being prepared. I shall have to wait until the last weekend in July when Skye Gyngell, Peterham’s presiding genius, is providing food to go with the wines on tasting at the Cloudy Bay Shack on Parsons Green, in West London. Failing that, she is making Sunday lunch for 800 at the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire on August 14th.

Today’s menu certainly looks inviting. A £13 starter of bruschetta, speck, stracchino and radicchio with saporoso (which turns out to be a form of balsamic vinegar) looks tempting. So does a main course of monkfish curry with clams, coconut, coriander and bathura (again I had to look it up; it’s an Indian bread) for £29.50. The Michelin inspectors enjoyed the food here enough to waive their rules about white table cloths and sleek loos when, this year, Petersham Nurseries Cafe was awarded its first star - a triumph chalked up on a blackboard like a special of the day.

Cooks who achieve that level of perfection tend to be highly-organised control freaks. Skye Gyngell doesn’t appear that sort at all. She arrives late, having dropped her younger daughter Evie at school; she would have called had her mobile not been stolen, a drama which she shrugs off with only a wry face. As she talks she twists her hair like an awkward teenager, yesterday’s eye-make up appears to be clogging up the corner of her eye. It makes her look like the “f... up”, as she calls it, from the days when she was addicted first to heroin, then alcohol.

Is she the Courtney Love of cooking? In fact, those black marks around the eye are, she explains, tiny stitches left after three operations in the last two months to remove a skin cancer that was growing into her eye, a legacy from being a teenager in Sydney Australia thirty years ago. “On the beach someone would spray you with coconut oil for $1. I have exactly the wrong colouring.

Do you have the recipe for Jamie Oliver's (Jamie at Home) BBQ ...

I’ve just watched this on channel 4 and found myself drooling over his bbq sauce. Unfortunately, the video on his website is for a slightly different recipe : (

He has a book coming out on the 6th Sept but if you can’t wait until then, I suggest getting 4OD ( http://www.channel4.com/4od/index.html?cntsrc=ppc_4od_google_4od ) where you’ll find the episode available to download soon. It will be free and you’ll be able to watch it again. Make sure you take some notes this time! You can pause and rewind so you won’t miss any details.

Have fun!

Thanks Effingpot, I was searching for that too.. I managed to write most ingredients in my mobile last night, but forgot the orange, which could’ve made all the difference! By the way, do you remember what cut of lamb it was? He usually goes with leg or shoulder, and was it ‘butterflied’ (just learned that from Jamie’s Youtube site!) and was it chicken legs or?

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