Winning the "British Bake Off" in 2015 was just the start for Nadiya Hussain, who has since went on to inspire us with her mouth-watering, easy to prepare recipes on TV and in her books.
Now, her latest adventure, "Nadiya’s Asian Odyssey," sees her traveling through Thailand, Cambodia and Nepal to learn more about its people, places and food as part of her adventure to further explore her identity.
We caught up with Nadia recently for a quick chat.
What has been the highlight of your career since winning the Bake Off?
I've done some incredible things and I am proud of everything, but it has to be when I baked the cake for the queen's 90th birthday. That's pretty much up there at the top.
What was your biggest challenge you experienced through this journey and how did you cope with it?
I think the biggest challenge was doing Bake off, because what you don't know how far you are going to get and in my head I thought that I would be kicked out in week one, and then week two, and three, and then suddenly it was week 10, and there I was standing in the finals, so that was probably the most difficult things I've done, because it does take up a lot of your life. It's not just about filming the show over the weekend, but practicing during the week and it's all just very consuming.
What's the one thing you want to accomplish during your food journey?
I don't think I've got a mission, but what I would love to see change in food and in cooking is peoples' attitudes change towards food. We live in a society where we get told what we can and can't eat o often, we get told what’s good and bad for us and what that has done is strip us of the love of food. I would love to see more people enjoy food and talk about how much they love it as opposed to why they shouldn’t be eating it.
What’s the method of madness you use to come up with your recipes.
It’s all a little higgledy piggledy in my head. I think of recipes in the middle of the night, I could go out for dinner and think, “I want to recreate that”, or I could be watching TV and think, “I could do that a little bit better”. So it’s constant, I am always thinking about how to do new things. I have a notebook in every single room and there are lists of recipes I need to do. They have accumulated now to about 300.