I never thought I’d have the opportunity to share a plate of pasta with Jamie Oliver.
A couple weeks ago, I received an email asking if I’d like to fly to London to cook with Jamie, and cover a private class for a small group of lucky winners? As a longtime fan of Jamie and all he represents in the food world, I jumped at the opportunity even though I only had a few days’ window to fly out and come back. Jamie Oliver!!
How it happened…
How did it all come to be? In an effort to engage Canadians in a better conversation about food – something Jamie represents as well as anyone I can think of – Sobeys kicked off their #BetterFoodforAll campaign with various challenges, including a Better Burger Challenge and more recently, the Better You Challenge, in which participants were invited to share their healthy food resolution stories through their social media channels. The grand prize: a trip for two to London to cook with Jamie. Employees were also invited to participate, which is pretty cool – in the end two winners were chosen, and they and their husbands flew out to London to meet Jamie. I was asked to come along for the ride – and to cover the day on my social media channels. Of course I was more than happy to.
Monday was the day
I barely slept Sunday night, anticipating Monday – I met the winners, Aviva Wittenberg and Rachel Morse and their husbands in the hotel lobby in the late morning and we walked over to Fifteen, Jamie’s restaurant that famously employs marginalized youth, for lunch. We ate a fantastic meal, met a member of Jamie’s team, and learned about just some of the good things he does at home in London. (Jamie and his family actually live in Essex, but has many restaurants, offices and other goings on in London.)
We made our way to Recipease, Jamie’s cafe/cooking school/shop in Notting Hill, in the late afternoon, and spent some time looking through his cookbooks, prepared foods and kitchenware before heading upstairs to another demonstration kitchen surrounded by a cafe, all of which was closed off for the event.
Jamie arrived – and stayed longer than planned
We were chatting over a beautiful antipasto spread when he walked in through the back door, sliding an arm around me as he said hello, with exactly the voice and personality that comes through on TV – he was no different. He was friendly, charming, charismatic, helpful, chatty – everything you’d imagine he’d be in real life, having developed this sense of a personal relationship through decades of TV, cookbooks and Food Tube, his short-form online cooking segments.
Jamie demonstrated how to make fresh pasta, pulling together a simple dough with 00 flour – a superfine Italian flour often used for pasta and pizza dough – and brilliant orange egg yolks, kneading it and cranking it through a pasta machine until it was a thin scarf – thinner than a beer mat, he told us (a coaster, that is) – and then he turned some into noodles and the rest into fresh ravioli, stuffed with ricotta and stinging nettles, cooked down with butter, olive oil, garlic and chilies.
He talked about the challenges he faces as a parent of four kids who aren’t always up for eating what he wants them to, and feeding everyone well every night amid busy schedules, and the mistakes he made on the road to where he is today – a fascinating thought, that he regrets some choices and feels he’s responsible for his own setbacks; in my eyes, he couldn’t be any more successful at what he does. I find Jamie Oliver fascinating not only because of his charm and charisma and ability to use his power for good, but because of his worldwide appeal – everyone knows him, and everyone loves him. Kids love him, grandparents love him, men and women love him. When I crossed the border and the UK customs agent asked what I was doing in London and I told him, he said, “huh. So Jamie Oliver is famous over there, too?” Yes.
And then there was dinner
After Jamie made pasta, cooked it, and demonstrated saucing it properly (with butter, Parm and just the right amount of pasta cooking water, flipped in with the bowl of his tongs) and we all dug in with forks to take the first few bites, we all set about making our own, trying not to be distracted by the thought of chopping garlic and chilies in the immediate presence of Jamie O (I admit to having some performance anxiety.) He made the rounds and was helpful, walking everyone through the process and making them feel good about what they were doing – even salvaging pasta dough that looked like it should be tossed in the bin and started again from scratch. Chef Dan Batten, who runs the cooking school at Recipease, was extremely helpful too – supplying each of us with loaded cheese boards, piles of greens, garlic, chilies, and beautiful pale green eggs to work with. We talked about the quality of ingredients, how versatile they are, and how filled pastas like ravioli make great vehicles for leftovers – addressing food waste at home is an important issue these days.
All good things must come to an end
After about an hour in the kitchen we all sat down to eat together – the good folks at Recipease had even made us platters of desserts – and Jamie hugged everyone goodbye, paused for photos and slipped out, having to get home to pack for a trip to Greece to shoot the next day.
It was an experience I’ll never forget – huge thanks to Sobeys and the #BetterFoodforAll campaign for starting this important conversation online, and across Canada.
Julie Van Rosendaal
@dinnerwithjulie
Julie Van Rosendaal is the author of seven best-selling cookbooks, and a contributor to many others. Julie has been the food columnist on the Calgary Eyeopener on CBC Radio One for 10 years, is the food editor of Parents Canada magazine and has regular columns in and writes for numerous publications, including Swerve, Avenue, Western Living, the Calgary Herald and City Palate. She co-hosted three seasons of the TV series It’s Just Food with chef Ned Bell, is a food stylist for TV, print and corporate clients, and she writes and takes photos for her award-winning food blog, dinnerwithJulie.com, which documents real life in her home kitchen in Calgary with her husband, Mike, and 9 year old son, Willem.
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