Keep calm – Jamie Oliver serves up a slice-olation special for home cooks in hibernation

Working from home comes with an added serving of chaos if you’re Jamie Oliver – who is filming his latest cooking show while juggling homeschooling four of his five kids.

When you’re Jamie Oliver, working from home adds an extra layer of chaos to crisis isolation even the most hard-pressed parents would not envy.

Besides juggling the homeschooling of four of his five children, the celebrity chef has turned a small sitting room in his heritage Essex home into a makeshift studio, where he’s been filming extra episodes of the wildly popular cooking show, inspired by the coronavirus crisis.

Stuffing sofa cushions against walls as soundproofing, and with wife Jools as both his sous chef, sound recordist, camera assistant and director, the couple are doing what they can to help their countrymen and global fans.

And Jamie: Keep Cooking And Carry On specials have hit the spot for home-bound households, short on supermarket supplies and desperate to keep their families fed.

On the TV show’s menu: pasta from scratch, bread baking, easy recipes he’s hoping even beginners will understand.

The pressure, if there’s any, is on Oliver himself, who offered to film the extra episodes to meet demand.

“ Outside of live TV, making shows usually takes a few months,” Oliver tells News Corp Australia, “but we managed to turn these episodes around in just a few days before we went into lockdown. The team was small but agile and they’ve done an amazing job – we’re all just proud to have made something that might be useful to people and have had brilliant feedback from the audience.”

Jamie Oliver stars in a new cooking series, Jamie: Keep Cooking and Carry On. Picture: Supplied/10

Once lockdown laws were ordered by the UK Government, Oliver took on production of the second season and daily episodes by himself – using just his iPhone.

“Since all this started, we’ve been really listening – like we always do – to what our audience is asking for on social. The biggest message is that not everyone can get their hands on the same ingredients, so I’ve set out to share really bendy, flexible, principle recipes that people can make their own, swapping ingredients out as they go along. Across the shows you’ll see a whole spectrum of recipes from curries to soups, from simple bread to a freezer fish pie.”

As for keeping his only family calm and carrying on, Oliver answered honestly.

“ I mean with five kids I’m not going to lie, it’s chaos,” he said.

“We’re trying to keep the school routine going and do lots of activities. We’ve gone a bit old-school and been doing stuff like playing Connect 4 and we even made tie-dye t-shirts. Jools is in cleaning overdrive and [son] Buddy’s been helping me out in the kitchen – he loves it.

Oliver sees this enforced hibernation as an opportunity to educate children and get them involved in the cooking process.

“I’d say now is a really lovely time to get kids involved in food prep and cooking. Giving them that chance to understand food and where it comes from, giving them a bit of ownership over something, really helps and – with little ones – ups the chances that they’ll actually eat it,” he said.

* Jamie: Keep Cooking and Carry On, 7.30pm, Sunday April 05, on 10.

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JAMIE’S CAULIFLOWER MAC N’ CHEESE

INGREDIENTS

15 g unsalted butter

1 leek

1 stick of celery

½ a bulb of fennel, optional

1 small head of cauliflower (or 600g)

450 g dried pasta

1 tablespoon plain flour

500 ml semi-skimmed milk

1 teaspoon English mustard

100 g mixed cheese, such as Cheddar, Parmesan, feta, halloumi

100 g stale bread

2 cloves of garlic

A few sprigs of fresh herbs, such as thyme or oregano, optional

Olive oil

METHOD

Preheat the oven to 180ºC.

Put a large shallow ovenproof casserole pan on a medium heat with the butter.

Trim, halve, wash and slice the leek and add to the pan. Stir regularly while you trim, slice and add the celery, then trim, chop and add the fennel, if using.

Break the cauliflower into florets, then cut into 2cm-thick slices and finely slice the stalk and any nice leaves. Add the stalk and leaves to the pan and cook for 10 minutes, or until soft but not coloured, stirring regularly.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta in a large pan of boiling salted water for 8 minutes (five if using macaroni).

Reserving a mugful of starchy cooking water, drain the pasta and pour into a 25cm x 35cm baking dish (or divide between smaller ones).

Stir the flour into the veg pan for 30 seconds, then gradually pour in the milk, stirring all the time, followed by 500ml of water.

Simmer for five minutes, then stir in the mustard and season with sea salt and black pepper.

Add the cauliflower florets to the sauce and let it blip away until thickened while you coarsely grate the cheese.

Stir the cheese into the sauce, then blitz until smooth with a hand blender, or in batches in a food processor.

Pour over the pasta then, if you need to loosen it, add a little reserved pasta water – the sauce will thicken up as it bakes.

Blitz your stale bread into crumbs in the processor (or smash up in a clean tea towel).

Peel and grate the garlic. Pick the herb leaves, if using, and mix it all together with one tablespoon of olive oil.

Scatter the crumbs over the pasta, grating over more cheese, if you’ve got it, then bake for 30 minutes, or until golden and bubbling.

TOP TIP

Two of my girls are gluten-free and it’s easy to swap gluten-free pasta and flour into this recipe. Either switch out the bread for a gluten-free alternative or leave out altogether. You could always sprinkle over some seeds instead.

Originally published as Keep calm – Jamie Oliver serves up a slice-olation special for home cooks in hibernation