Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

This week, we’re visiting the kitchens of everyday India to find the food behind closed doors with chef, food writer and broadcaster, Roopa Gulati,Brought up in Cumbria, Roopa spent 20 years as a chef in Delhi before she came home to advise on Rick Stein’s India series for BBC2. She's a woman who knows how to find the story in everyday food, and Indian Kitchens is an extraordinary story behind the recipes of 12 different communities to find the food that makes up a nation.  Bee Wilson raves about it, Tom Parker Bowles calls it a modern classic, Diana Henry  says, 'The recipes are pure gold.'  Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Roopa and the recipe for the lamb in ginger and orange from her food moments.

This week, we’re back at Rockwater, Hove with River Cottage writer, Lucy Brazier telling a live audience about her memoir, The Honesty Box.It’s a highly moving and very funny diary about healing a broken marriage and growing enough vegetables to fill her new distraction, an honesty box. But the rickety old receptable outside her garden gate is also a metaphor for the treasure trove she finds as she lifts the lid on the mental health crisis her husband – and the rest of the family – have been living with.We begin with a question from the audience about the title, and if it was always meant to have such a brilliant double meaning. Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Lucy and the audience Q&A at Cooking the Books Live. 

Laurie Woolever is back on the pod, four years since we last met her to talk about the last book she wrote with the late, great Anthony Bourdain.  This time she’s telling her own story in Care and Feeding: A Memoir which paints a vivid picture of a bright, sensitive woman beset with anxiety trying to find her way into food writing in a world of celebrity chefs and toxic masculinity in turn of the century New York.Her work as a food writer for chef, Mario Batali and at Art Culinaire, the glossy magazine about chefs for chefs, gave her a unique point of view on the food scene of the time, and as personal assistant to Bourdain as well as his ghost writer, she’s seen a lot of life.This memoir feels like a claim on her own story in a narrative that has been haunted by her much-missed boss long after he died in 2018, and Gilly finds out where and who she is without him.Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Laurie.

This week, as Trump tramples over the future of Eastern Europe – and indeed the rest of Europe, we’re with Siberian-born food writer and co-founder of #CookforUkraine, Alissa Timoshkina.Her latest book, Kapusta: Vegetable-Forward Recipes from Eastern Europe is a celebration of the humble cabbage (and four other vegetables) in the everyday kitchens of Eastern Europe. Her co-founder of CookforUkraine, Olia Hercules calls it ‘A rare cookbook that engages our thinking and delights our senses’ and Nigella has already propped it up in her Cookbook Corner.  In a world that is in such turmoil at the moment, a book about the rich history of Eastern European food and its peoples can do much to remind us all of the taste and flavour of a part of the world eclipsed by the headlines of war. Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Alissa.

This week, we’re back with our favourite doctor, Saliha Mahmood Ahmed and her latest book, The 20 Minute Gut Health Fix. Saliha is a specialist registrar in gastroenterology with a Masters in Nutrition,an award winning food writer and the 2017 winner of MasterChef. She’s been on this show to talk about Foodology and The Kitchen Prescription, but since we last met, beans have made it back into the mainstream. Gilly finds out if we're on our way to gut health.Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Saliha including a recipe from the book.

This week, Gilly puts her pack on her back and heads to Thailand, Baja California, Sri Lanka and Mexico with holistic chef Samantha Dormehl to explore her Wanderlust Kichen.The book is a spiritual guide to healing recipes from around the world, and the result of years of travelling, eating with locals, cooking in their kitchens and slowing right down to experience the wonders of the world through eating together. Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Sam, and a recipe from the book.

This week, we’re celebrating CTB’s fifth birthday with another in our series of Live events at Rockwater in Hove, this time with Claire Thomson.The Five o clock Apron, as she’s more commonly known was with us to talk about her latest book One Pan Beans, the 10th in her series of how to cook books. In front of an audience of super-fans, she told us how to elevate the simplest of ingredients - beans, chickpeas and lentils - into fabulous weekday meals and weekend feasts.Pop over to Gilly's Substack for the Q&A which has masses of tips from the book.

This week, Gilly finds out what happens when life falls apart, and grows again, with Kathy Slack’s Rough PatchKathy was a high flying executive living the dream in Adland... until it became a nightmare. Burn out gave way to clinical depression and a very dark place indeed. Ultimately hers is a story about nature, dogs and how growing veg saved her, but she doesn’t pull any punches, and trigger warning, she and Gilly do talk about how depression can lead to suicidal thoughts, although thankfully not in her case.Pop over to Substack for Extra Bites of Kathy, including the recipe from that Pitstop Tart.And if you or someone you know needs to talk about suicide, here are some useful numbers:Samaritans 📞 116123Papyrus- for under 35s 📞 08000684141And to learn how to have compassionate, courageous conversation that could save a life, click here to Start the Conversation

This week, Gilly's with Niloufer Mavalvala to discover the food of the Zorastrians in the fourth of her compendium, The Route to Parsi Cooking.This is about food without borders, a cuisine which is under threat as so many are when their people are displaced. But as we hear so often on this show, they can also become the roots to a culture. With only about 200k Zoroastrians living around the world, Niloufer tells Gilly why she has  taken it upon herself to revive this ancient cuisine.Click here for Extra Bites of Niloufer on Gilly's Substack