If you’ve ever picked up one of Nisha Katona’s cookbooks, or seen her on Great British Menu, you’ll know she’s super glam and super sharp. What you don’t imagine is the businesswoman, Mowgli Street Food empire founder and former child protection barrister assessing alpaca poo.
“I judge animals on the size of their poo, and alpaca poo is very manageable,” says the 53-year-old with a laugh, and she means it. When deciding whether to buy her three alpacas, she remembers: “I just stood and watched them go to the toilet for about an hour and thought, ‘How tough is that to clean?’”
The British Indian chef is as passionate about her animals as she is about teaching people “humble cooking, the stuff you throw together with what’s dying in the fridge, what’s rotting in the veg rack and what’s in the freezer.” Her new ITV1 show, Nisha Katona’s Home Kitchen, combines the two in what she calls a “preposterous privilege”.
The series gives us a glimpse into the Wirral-based chef’s farm, where she whips up chicken Dhansak and dahl in her outdoor kitchen, and those cuddly alpacas roam, joined by four horses, two tiny dogs (one is sat beside her during our Zoom chat), guinea fowl, chickens and ducks (“We hatch them from eggs, raise them and they come in the house and hand feed”), and potentially in the future, a miniature donkey, poo dependent.
And don’t worry, you can become emotionally attached to her animals; they are absolutely not on the menu. “I don’t even eat the eggs my chickens give,” says Katona. “Every single night I go out and just stand with the animals, sit with the goats or the alpacas. They are honestly part of my family. I couldn’t eat them, I love them.”
The series kicks off boldly, focussing on one of the most unassuming of ingredients that many of us deliberately avoid: lentils. To Katona, they’re a delicious kind of magic and “the cornerstone of Indian cooking”. “Lentils are possibly the cheapest and most delicious thing you can eat,” she says. “Showing people how you can create a million flavours in 15 minutes with these dried things in your cupboard, literally, that’s alchemy.”
Episode one is also packed with tips: swap coriander for lemon zest if someone hates it, freeze ice cube trays of blitzed garlic and ginger to save time, slosh your dahl back into the pan you tempered your spices in “because we literally don’t want to waste one seed”.
This is pure Katona, trying to up-skill us in every moment. “I don’t want people to just blindly follow things. I want to give them the skills. It’s almost like teaching them the neural pathways of an Indian grandmother,” says Katona.
“The more you can give people a story behind why something happens, they’re not then clinging to a recipe. I never want people to think, ‘I’ve got to get the recipe book out,’ to do something. I want it to be in their memories and their stories, in their heads and their fingers.”
Throughout the show, Katona shares stories from her own family, from her dad’s love of spreading dahl on toast, to getting her Hungarian mother-in-law into the kitchen with her. “I was very nervous about that because, being on telly, it’s one thing for me who voluntarily does it, but my family being caught on telly, you just don’t know how they’re going to feel about themselves,” says Katona.
“Everyone who sees themselves on telly hates themselves. You hate your voice, you hate the way you look. It’s awful! And that’s all right, me punishing myself like that, but I don’t want that for my family. I was really worried about it. But I’ve watched some of the clips of us together, and I can just see that I am my happiest self.”
Aside from wanting to join the Katona clan, you may find yourself Rightmove-ing ‘the Wirral’ after seeing the sweeping drone shots of the area’s countryside, farmland and vast beaches.
“I am really pathologically passionate about heralding how brilliant it is beyond the M25,” says Katona, who built her first 23 restaurants outside of London (she now has one in the capital, with another opening soon), in places like Preston, Sheffield, Leicester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow.
“Cities that I think need social capital. Programmes like this just enhance that mission of mine, which is to show people that there is a great life to be had at a non-punishing rent outside of London,” she buzzes.
“London is the best city in the whole world for food, for me,” she adds, “but in terms of quality of life, of space where you might want to raise a family, or even if you don’t want a family, where you might raise a smallholding and get a nice plot of land and you’ve got your own patch of stars, that’s an amazing thing.”
In November, Katona stepped down from the Great British Menu on BBC, and if you’re upset, you aren’t half as upset as she is. “I’m so sad! I was FaceTiming with [co-judge] Tom [Kerridge] last night!” she says. “It makes me want to cry to know I’m not working with them. I love them so much.”
But she explains she’s got to “pick my battles.” “This year, I’m building another five or six restaurants, and I wasn’t seeing my family. I wasn’t living life – what’s the point working that hard when you’re sitting and eating on your own in a hotel in the evenings? That’s not life. So I had to step off that stage. It’s got to be one of the hardest decisions I’ve made, because I love them and the show. Forget the show. Those humans make my mouth water!”
Katona lost a close friend, who was only 56, in November to a heart attack. “It made me think, you’ve got one life. You’ve got to be with the people that matter and do the things that matter. It sounds so stupid and trite to talk about a TV show mattering, but it does matter to me to teach people to be able to cook, and to be able to do that, combined with me actually living a life and feeding my goats, that is a gift I cannot be more grateful for.”
She adds: “We don’t need soaring achievements. We don’t need massive prowess in life. What we need is contentment.” And ideally, an alpaca to look at the stars with.
Nisha Katona’s Home Kitchen launches on ITV, ITVX, STV and STV Player at 11:40am on Saturday, February 8.
