Easy to Make: Haloumi kebabs are just one of the delights you can learn to make at Recipease.
Jamie Oliver must get very little sleep. Either that or the ingenious chef has an army of worker bees constantly turning over ideas for his consideration.
His latest venture, Recipease, is about to launch in the UK. Like so many of his ideas (the school canteen overhaul and Pass it On recipe movement, for example), the concept is brilliant, yet oh, so simple you wonder why it hasn’t been done before. (Or maybe it has, and they just don’t have the profile of this knockabout lad.)
This one-stop food shop-cum-cooking-school takes away many of the barriers to eating freshly-prepared, good quality meals, providing, of course, you happen to be lucky enough to live nearby. The emporium becomes your kitchen, complete with personal shoppers and assistants. All you need to do is book ahead.
Don’t know what to cook tonight? Choose from hundreds of delicious Jamie offerings on the website. Don’t have time to shop for the ingredients? Jamie’s staff will have it all chopped and prepared for you when you arrive in store. Not sure if you’re doing the right thing? His staff are on hand to assist. Don’t have time to cook it? With all the preparation done for you, it should only take about 10 minutes to cook the dish up in Jamie’s kitchen and the staff will pack it for you to take home. Jamie calls it Easy To Make.
If you want to take it a bit further, there are cooking classes, Easy To Learn. Choose from Get Learning, one hour sessions covering useful skills such as how to chop,slice and dice to making a basic tomato base; Get Cooking, one and a half hours of learning to make a Jamie recipe from scratch; or Get Creative, a two-hour session that helps you take your skills in the kitchen to a whole new level.
Like the man says, “If you’re going to eat three times a day for the rest of your life, you might as well learn to cook properly and enjoy it.”
In keeping with Jamie’s community spirit, Recipease is also promoting Easy to Know, which basically means the shop wants to be a source of inspiration for ideas and recipes as well as sharing what’s going on in the local area and with food in general.
For those of you too busy to spare even in a few minutes in the kitchen, or simply grabbing some food at the last minute on the way home, there is a range of freshly prepared meals in-store to take away. This is, of course, called Easy To Go.
And, Jamie promises, that all food at Recipease will be sourced with the utmost responsibility. “For us, an ingredient doesn’t just have to taste amazing, it has to be have been grown or raised, then delivered to our shops, in a way that we can all feel good about.” In other words, with the chef favouring organic, locally grown, fresh and in-season produce you can forget processed foods chock full of additives and preservatives.
Yes, as I’ve written before, he has his critics, but you have to admire a chef so passionate about getting people to spend a little time thinking about something so central to our lives – and our livelihoods – and making it as accessible as possible. Just wish he’d open a Recipease around the corner from me.
The first shop, in London’s Clapham Junction, opens on February 26. Stay tuned for more to follow – it will go gangbusters. See Jamie Oliver’s official website for more details on Recipease.
