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.

They aren’t words you’d expect from the mouth of an organic food devotee but restaurateur Jesse Ziff Cool is no stick-in-the-mud.

She wants people to eat the best they can most of the time, but a little indulgence every now and then is just fine by her. “I call it my 80/20 rule,” she says. “I raised my kids that way and I tell everyone not to beat themselves up for occasionally wandering off the path. We’re only human after all.”

If anyone deserves the occasional “poison” (she favours gin, organic gin), it’s Jesse. An advocate of organic eating long before it became the flavour of the month, she defied those who said it couldn’t be done and operates not one, but three organic and sustainable restaurants in California.

Her approach to food is simplicity itself, a philosophy reflected in her latest cookbook, Simply Organic: A Cookbook for Sustainable, Seasonal and Local Ingredients: Choose the best quality produce you can afford at its peak and marry it with ingredients that let it shine.

Homegrown wisdom: Jesse Ziff Cool knows the value of fresh produce.

The affable cook (she’s not a big fan of the word chef) was born into an Italian-Jewish family whose lives revolved around good food.

Her parents and grandparents lovingly tended their backyard produce without resorting to pesticides, they raised and ate their own chickens, her father presided over a small supermarket in Pennsylvania where locally grown produce reigned, and home was always awash with the smell of something delicious brewing.

Not that she knew it then, but Jesse was already getting an education in the organic way.

At 27, she opened her first organic restaurant with her then husband Bob. To say it was a challenge was an understatement; they were repeatedly told a restaurant offering organic and sustainable produce was not viable, assuming they could even get hold of such fare to begin with. But Jesse persisted, even when she and Bob parted. More than 30 years on, she still has to pinch herself to think how far the organic movement has come – out of the fringes and into the mainstream.

“The local movement has been very important for organic too; it’s important to start with where you are, eat food that grows near you,” she says. “Of course if you live in upstate Maine that message from someone in California with its abundance of fresh produce can sound a bit mean. But we need to change the notion of what people think of fresh food.”

Jesse believes fresh produce canned and frozen at its peak is just as “real”, tasty and nutritious. “I still dry my own tomatoes and make pickles,” she says. “There are so many ways to make use of food in season for later in the year when it’s not available.”

And despite the global financial crisis already hitting sales of organic fare, Jesse is optimistic about the future. “Human beings are extremely impatient,” she argues. “But I’m more of a big picture person. When I think of what it was like when I started 35 years ago, I never imagined we would be where we are now. It’s so much more than a fad and in some ways, we’ve moved beyond organic, beyond local… it’s really about cooking and connecting. We’re getting back to thinking about the importance of fresh food, as well as the sense of community it brings.”

A big supporter of local farmers, who she describes as her heroes, Jesse believes this connection with where food comes from is vital. “You know I go to these farming conferences and these people are my real teachers,” she says.

“We need to nurture a real feeling for food and then take it another step further and cook for each other.”

Her two sons might not have been as keen on her homemade style when they were growing up, craving the junk food hits of their peers, but she’s proud to say as grown men they totally get it.

“My youngest, who is doing his PHD at Duke University, spends more money on food than anything else because he knows how important it is… he’s always cooking,” she says. “You know food plays such a vital role in our lives. We sit, we eat and we talk. We can stop doing that for a while but not for long or we start to suffer.”

Now a grandmother, Jesse sees her role as an advocate for the politics of food, for food justice as she calls it, as an ongoing one. She wants to see a fair price for the freshest, most sustainable food available – for farmers and consumers. And she’s in hot demand as a speaker on the topic.

She’s proud of the project she does with student teachers from Stanford University, showing them (and the children they bring along) the joys of growing food from scratch and cooking it in simple and enticing ways. She is also relishing a new assignment to get healthy organic food into the university’s hospital.

“I’m a very present person. I tend to do things and let them go, but my work is very meaningful. I get a lot out of it,” Jesse says.

She has also obviously put a lot into it. “I almost went bankrupt a couple of times… but because I came from humble beginnings I didn’t need a lot of money. You know, I had no clue about being a businesswoman and I’ve learnt a lot with some incredible people along the way,” she says.

“I wasn’t always perfect, my restaurants weren’t always perfect and I didn’t make money for a long time. My success has been in learning to hire people who are different and better than me. I’ve surrounded myself with talented people.”

She’s also refused to let go of a dream that many others thought was hippy-dippy at best, complete madness at worst. “To have something you believe in suddenly not be part of the lunatic fringe is wonderful. For it to be understood and embraced by more people is incredibly satisfying.”

For more on Jesse and her work, click here.

Jamie’s Ministry of Food
Anyone Can Learn to Cook in 24 Hours
By Jamie Oliver

People seem to either love or hate Jamie Oliver. Personally, I can’t understand why anyone who cares about food would fall into the latter category. Sure, his laddie patter might irk some, but the guy is passionate about getting us to eat smarter and better, no matter our budget or cooking skills. And he doesn’t simply preach at us from some high-falutin “chefdom”; he gets off his butt and out there with the masses (often copping abuse for his trouble) to show us how it’s done. Now, how can you hate that?

His latest book is timely, given the need to tighten belts on two fronts – economically and health-wise. Jamie’s Ministry of Food takes its name from the British ministry set up during the Second World War to show people how to cook healthily on a budget, and the book (and related TV series) has a similar purpose.

Jamie believes we all should “know how to cook simple, nutritious, economical, tasty and hearty food from scratch” and he’s on a mission to make it a reality for as many as possible. He wants everyone who buys the book to make a pledge to learn just one recipe from each chapter and pass it on – to friends, family and work colleagues.

For beginners, he describes what kitchen tools to buy, as well as what to stock in our pantry and freezer. There are 14 chapters full of dishes, many accompanied by step-by-step pictures, that are no less tantalising for their simplicity. Try a basic stew with four variations, a hearty sweet potato and chorizo soup, a sizzling stir-fry, Moroccan lamb with couscous or, if you’re pushed for time, there’s a selection of 20-minute sensations. There are also clear instructions for basic sauces, gravy and dressings so that you can make something out of nothing every time.

Jamie wants home cooks to embrace fresh, local and organic (particularly for meat) ingredients, but reminds us that there is nothing substandard about tinned tomatoes or frozen fruit and vegetables, either. “Unless you’re picking from your garden you’ll have to go a long way to get a tastier and more nutritional pea than a frozen one.”

Ministry of Food is all about discovering the joy of real food cooked well – by you! Judging by the book’s potted interviews with new converts to the kitchen, and the million-plus who’ve visited his site to find out more since the launch, Jamie has once again struck a nerve. As he writes, “Good food and good eating aren’t a class thing – anyone can eat good food on any budget as long as they know how to cook.”

Nice One Jamie.