Recipe Fridays: The Best of Jamie Oliver (so far)

I have to admit, that my first introduction to the work of Jamie Oliver was here at Femonomics, when we reviewed his new show Food Revolution. Since then, I've been DVR'ing episodes of Jamie at Home, and have checked out his books from the library. I think I might be in love. Not only are his recipes exactly the kind of think I like to eat, they are "dead simple" and really impressive. A few of my favorites so far:

English Onion Soup - like the traditional French, but with as many kinds of onions you can get your hands on.

Proper Chicken Ceasar Salad - cooking the croutons underneath the chicken, and later bacon, makes them ridiculously delicious.

Zucchini Carbonara - this is a little trickier, and requires a lot of prep time (for me), but is super tasty and massively impressed a colleague I cooked it for.

A couple of notes, Jamie adds red pepper and pours olive oil on top of everything. There's no need to replicate that, it's just his tic. He also uses really expensive ingredients - organic, local, the highest quality. That's all well and good for a multi-millionaire, but I just do the best I can. In most cases, you can get by with whatever's in the grocery store.


You can see from the video below that he loves the dramatic intro, which makes me roll my eyes a little. But he's also super cute, and he giggles when something is really delicious!

He also said the following about his wife, model Juliette Oliver (nee Norton), expressing a very different sentiment than you see from what a lot of American men might say:

Jools is interesting cos she’s not like me at all. She hasn’t got a mission, she just wants to be married to someone she loves and have a family and that’s it, end of story. It’s odd for me, because I’ll go, what do you want to do? Then do that, I’ll help you! Because I believe that anyone can do anything. If I wanted to be a surgeon, then I would be, I’d just have to work my arse off for 10 years. It baffled me for ages, I almost felt she had a part of her life missing, then I thought, it’s sweet and quite refreshing, especially in London.

Celebrity crush of the month!