Top 30 Nadiya Hussain Quotes

My own kids are absolutely allowed to help me cook it. They of course have the added bonus of knowing how to bake. That wasn’t really a concept when I was a kid – I learned it at school in home economics, then started properly when I was home with my children. They love helping me.

I really want my daughter to see that she can go out to work, but equally I want my sons to see it.

My grandmother spent a lot of time with us when we were growing up. She did the school runs and fed us when my mum was busy. To be with her was to really be at home.

Once a month we have ‘dessert for dinner’ night. I’ll make four separate desserts. They’ll come home from school and eat as much cake and custard and ice cream as they can physically get in their guts. Because sometimes I think, let them just be children.

My dad’s an amazing photographer, and he loves a Sunday market. So the house was full of all the stuff he’d buy, and frame.

If I break my finger, I go to accident and emergency. If I have a cold, I go to the pharmacy. If I’m broken inside, where do I go? So, to help myself heal, I felt the best way to do this would be to talk, to share and to better understand what it is that I have.

When you are one of six, your brothers and sisters become your best mates.

I take everything out of the fridge and see what we can make. We talk about what we could possibly create, and if there is something on the turn that we could save, we chop it up and put it in the freezer.

Arranged marriages get a bad reputation. Do they always work? No, but that’s true of all marriages. As long as you aren’t forced, who cares how you get together?

I jumped off a 30ft diving board for a dare once and it wasn’t fun.

As a child my life felt like an adventure, because my dad is such a fun guy. I had a brother and sister who were in and out of hospital a lot – one had a congenital heart problem and the other had a cleft palate. But my parents never stopped smiling.

But I understand the importance of being a brown, Muslim woman of faith who is in the public eye, because there aren’t that many of us.

It’s taken me three years to learn that just because I work in the food industry, it doesn’t mean that I have to eat every minute of every day.

I only ever baked because it helped with my anxiety.

I do identify as a Muslim and I do identify as a Bangladeshi girl, I identify as British, as well, and a woman and I’m a woman of colour, and why am I ashamed of that? And I used to not want to talk about it. But that is me.

My mum was slightly disgruntled with cooking and being in the kitchen.

Pot Noodles are my true love because I don’t have to cook them. I have a ritual: take one pot noodle, add a teaspoon of chilli flakes and half of salt, plus all the seasoning it comes with.

Most summers we went to Bangladesh and stayed in Grandad’s village, filled with relatives. I’m one of 67 grandchildren.

In an average week I’ll be testing recipes, doing a voice-over, filming and writing. I cram everything in Monday to Friday because I refuse to give up the weekend.

Brexit makes me uncomfortable. It feels like we’re in no-man’s-land, and it doesn’t feel safe. People who voted to leave did so because of the scaremongering. It was all about immigration, but immigration is a great thing.

Sometimes my feelings need to come out of my mouth and my head so the universe can have them. That’s what the universe is there for: to take my bad thoughts away.

I first met my husband on the day we got married, when I was 20. I moved to be with him in Leeds, 165 miles from Luton. The kitchen was absolutely tiny. But I got my first hand-held mixer and first set of scales and first blue cake tin from Tesco and that was very exciting.

We have this rule in our marriage, there’s no such thing as 50/50. Somebody is always putting in more.

I’m forever making it out like I have got it all together and I know what I’m doing. The truth is I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing.

Cod and clementine is one of the things my grandmother cooked for my mum when she was a child. Never one for waste, she’d keep the peel whenever she had a clementine, and this dish puts it to work.

I feel like there’s a dignity in silence and I think if I retaliate to negativity with negativity then we’ve evened out. And I don’t need to even that out because if somebody’s being negative, I need to be the better person.

Everything is tested in my little kitchen. The recipes are mine and that’s really important to me. When I do a cookery show I know these recipes really well, because every recipe I’ve ever published has been tested by my kids.

There’s nothing wrong with using frozen and canned food. There’s nothing in this series I’m ashamed of. It’s the way I cook.

What’s happened to society is we’ve become really pretentious. But there was a time in my life where I really had to choose between boiling potatoes and paying my gas bill, so I’d buy a can of potatoes.

Saying it out loud as a child is scary, but saying I felt unstable out loud as an adult with children was really scary. The fear of losing your children stops you from saying anything. It’s a never-ending battle.