Inside My Kitchen: Georgina Hayden

For me, cooking is about nostalgia. I'm lucky because I've been cooking since I was really little, as my family had a restaurant. One of the first things I remember learning to cook was cakes with my mum. My mum always baked with us – we’d come home from school and make fairy cakes with green and red glacé cherries – very 80s. It's a lovely memory and something I definitely still do now, and want to pass on to my own girls. As I got older, I learned to make more elaborate dishes, such as stuffed vine leaves or avgolemono lemony soup, which is a Greek chicken, lemon and egg soup you make when you're poorly. 

Is there a meal I don't put chilli oil on? Probably not. But the main ingredient I rely on most is rice. Everyone has their favourite carbohydrate: mine is rice. I get through bags of the stuff a week. You can create a meal with very little if you’ve got a bag of rice – between rice, eggs and a few frozen vegetables you've got a meal straight away. It cooks in 10 minutes, you can make nutritious food very quickly and if all else fails, I know I can always knock-up a nasi goreng, a lovely Indonesian dish, with some soy, honey and vegetables. 

We bought a wood oven a couple of years ago for the garden. If I’m entertaining at home, there's a dish called tava, which is in my second book Taverna, and it's one of my favourite dishes. It’s the most bung-it-all-together, low-effort thing to make – just put lamb neck, rice, cumin, tomatoes, potatoes and onions in a massive tray. Wrap it up in foil, put in your oven and forget about it for a few hours and it's incredibly delicious. But if you put it in the wood oven, it's next level.

When I’m entertaining, I like to make one big dish that doesn't require attention. If you’re entertaining, you’ve got to be a good host. You can’t be standing there messing around with bits and bobs and saucers of garnishes. I want the food to look after itself so I can talk to my friends. I’ll have lots of bits on the side that you can prepare advance, like olives, a bowl of hummus, fresh bread, a big chopped salad. If you don’t have time to make your own hummus, buy it. For me, the big thing is having one showstopping main dish.

The best party I’ve ever thrown was New Year's Eve 2018. At the time, our daughter was one-and-a-half and none of our friends had kids. We were still at that age where we thought we could be really cool parents and still party. Little did we know that our friends would still be there at 4am and our daughter up at 6am. It was the worst New Year’s Day of my life. But the party was amazing – we had about 15 guests and I did a really informal, gorgeous dinner. I set the table and made a delicious Vietnamese coconut and slow-cooked beef recipe by my friend v. Her Angel restaurant – and the cookbook the recipe’s in – is called The Little Viet Kitchen. It’s another one-pot wonder and I served it with lots of French sticks and loads of salad and let everyone tuck in. People don't care if there aren’t loads of dishes – with a wickedly delicious dish like that, people just lost their minds.

When it comes to cocktails, I do love a picante. I love any sort of margarita with chilli or ginger in it. Picantes are great if you're just making a few as they’re quite involved. However if I'm entertaining, I will make a batch of chilli margaritas with sugar syrup, chilli, lots of ginger and millions of limes, then just mix that with tequila and serve over ice. It's something you can make in advance, and you can stretch it out rather than having to make individual drinks constantly.

My glassware collection has everything – from Ikea tumblers to crystal glasses I inherited from my grandmother. I’ve also got some really nice LSA wine glasses and some vintage champagne coupe glasses.

My cookbook collection is out of control – it’s absolutely groaning. I think Yotam Ottolenghi is a genius and I find myself going back to his books time and again – I think Jerusalem is one of the best he’s ever written. I'm a big fan of Asian food, so people like Maunika Gowardhan of @CookInACurry are inspiring. Her latest book is called Thali and is gorgeous – as is her first book, Indian Kitchen – and they both teach me everything I want to know about Indian cooking and use my favourite flavours.

On Sundays I tend to batch-cook porridge. There’s a recipe in my first book, Stirring Slowly, which is based on a porridge I ate when I was working in New York with a famous chef on her book. I ate this porridge at her restaurant and remember asking why it was the best I’d ever had, and the secret ingredient wasn’t double cream, it was pinhead oats. They take 45 minutes to cook down – which is why it's a weekend thing – but they go from being bullets to super creamy. It tastes unreal. We'll have that on Sunday with brown sugar on top, which melts and caramelises. I’ll Tupperware up the rest and we’ll eat it during the week. More often than not, the girls will want to make pancakes – which I'm totally fine with as we’ll do them with lots of yoghurt and berries. My favourite cake tin brand is called Nordicware, and I've got a frying pan of which makes individual American-style in the shape of snowflakes from Frozen. My daughter always wants Frozen pancakes, so that’s what we do at the weekends.