BALANCE_NOVEMBER_19 - 23

COVER
NADIYA
HUSSAIN

TIME MANAGEMENT

Nadiya suffers with panic disorder and so it was her husband who submitted
that life-changing Great British Bake Off application form before she roared
to glory in 2015. "There was no goal, there was no focus, there was no, 'Oh,
I want a career out of this,'" she explains.
Indeed, Nadiya refused to refer to the final, instead calling it "Week 10".
The F-word was banned from the Hussain house. "It's not about winning
for me," she explains. "It's about the fact that I got there and I didn't intend
to get there.
"Everything that came after that, again, not something that I expected,
not something that I even asked for. That, I suppose, is the part that's the
most organic in the sense that now, I get these opportunities to write
cookbooks, write fiction, do the things that I love, and more often than not,
somebody will say, 'Oh, would you like to do this?' and I'll say, 'No, no thank
you,' because it doesn't fit in with my lifestyle with the kids and y'know, it's
not always something that I want to do.
"I do what I want to do, and I love cooking and
I love writing, and so to be able to write cookbooks
feels like the most natural place in the world for
me, apart from motherhood."
Indeed, Time To Eat is more than just a
cookbook. As the title suggests, it gives you back
something you don't have in an increasingly
frantic world: time. BALANCE admits that we've
taken to batch cooking and it is a game-changer in
saving precious minutes.
"I was about six months into having my first
child, and I was already at this point three months
pregnant, so I was like, 'Whoa. Two kids by the
end of this year - when will I have time to do
anything?' Then they were on solids, and I was like, okay, so, I'm kind of
struggling to make time for me, for my husband, for life. As my family's
grown, the way I do it has changed. Quantities have obviously changed, but
the idea has been the same."
If you're thrifty, you're also in luck. "We live in a society now where it's
instant gratification," says Nadiya. "When we want something, we can just
order it in, we can go and buy it, and it's done, it's ready. We've almost lost
the ability to just work a little bit harder to get what we want, and I think
we're so good at throwing things away.
"I don't throw any of my peelings away, and there's recipes in this book
where you keep all your carrot, potato, parsnip, broccoli stalks, cauliflower
stalks, all of it, in a big freezer bag, and when you fill the freezer bag up, you
stick all of it into a massive stock pot, veg, loads of veg stalk, garlic, and then
you just cook that. And then you blitz it down, and you've got a vegetable
soup, and nobody will be the wiser that it was all made out of peelings."
Nadiya adds with a smile: "Don't throw anything away. If it doesn't kill
you, it's probably edible."

scared, imagine how great you're going to feel when you're on the other side
of fear and you look back at it and say, 'I so totally just did that.'"
Before we go, I tell Nadiya about the impact a close friend had on my
hometown in north Leeds. A Muslim of Pakistani heritage, he was a
profoundly positive role model purely by being a good person. Multiply that
by several million, and that's the impact Nadiya continues to have.
And she says: "I just see it as me doing my bit. And ultimately, my goal as
a parent is to raise good human beings - not good Muslims, not somebody
- you know, it's not about their identity, it's just about being a good person.
And I think that for me has always been the most important thing.
"If you'd asked me three years ago, 'How do you
feel about that?' I'd want to hide and say, 'No, I just
wanna bake cakes, and cook, and I kinda wanna
do my thing - don't talk to me about my religion,
I don't wanna get into all of that.' But now, it's
really different for me, because it's something that
I would have shied away from a few years ago, and
I understand the importance of doing it. It's quite
scary when I speak to people and they're like,
'Thank you for doing what you've done.' Like, what
have I done? I haven't really done anything."
And yet, she has done so much.
"If I go back to my 12, 13-year-old self and watch
TV, I could have thought, 'Oh there's nobody like
me.' I didn't think about it then, but I couldn't pick up a book and relate to
the book, I couldn't watch television and relate to the person, I couldn't go
into a room full of people and be one of them. Whereas now, I think the
difference is the fact that I'm doing it. I can do this, and I can stand there
and write a book where a girl can pick it up and say, 'I get her, I can relate to
that character.' Or they watch me on television and say, 'She's just like me.'
Or you know, just go into a room and say, 'I'm proud of who I am and I don't
need to be like anyone else,' that in itself is the biggest change that I can
make. And if I can raise three human beings who can be proud of who they
are - whatever that may be; if they can go into a room and say, 'You know
what, I'm proud of who I am and I don't have to be a part of anything - I can
just be me,' then that is so important. And that is why I refuse to go away."
She laughs. "I'm like, 'I'm not going away.' Elbows out, remember.
Elbows out. And I'm gonna hang around for as long as somebody says I'm
an imposter and then I'll fight some more. But until then, I'm gonna do
this for as long as possible because it is just about being decent. I think
with everything that happens in the media, sometimes it's really difficult...
because my little girl, after some of the things she watches on the news,
she just says, 'Mummy are we bad people? And is that why nobody likes
us?' And it's really hard to justify that, to explain that to an eight-year-old.
I always just say to her, 'Look, we are so many things, you know, we're
British, we're Bangladeshi, we're Muslims, you're a girl, he's a boy - we are
a family, but all we have to do is be the best version of ourselves. If anyone
tells you that you're not a good person, you tell them they're wrong, and you
have to believe that.'
"They see mummy go out, and they see me go through things where
I find certain situations really tricky, and you know, I'm in this industry
where there is nobody else like me, and it's hard sometimes... Because
I just think maybe if I faded away and left, it wouldn't matter.
"It does matter though, and I know that now. And I wouldn't have
answered this way three years ago, but it does matter, so I intend on sticking
around for as long as people are willing to cook and read."
Time to Eat: Delicious meals for busy lives is available to buy now
(Michael Joseph, £20)

I'M PROUD OF
WHO I AM AND
I DON'T HAVE
TO BE PART OF
ANYTHING

IMAGES Chris Terry

THE OTHER SIDE OF FEAR

Nadiya is living proof that, in order to grow, we have to scare ourselves and
get out of that comfort zone. "I was always afraid," she says. "My kids were
my security blanket; I was always scared." The 34-year-old then shares a
story about getting the taste for stepping out of her comfort zone, once
driving up the M1 in her late teens, purely on a whim, until she ran out
of petrol. "So for anyone who is sitting and kind of stewing over things, or
they're stuck in a bubble, think about what scares you the most. Just step
back and ask, 'What could I do that scares the life out of me?'
"I was scared to go into the supermarket without a baby inside the sitting
bit of the trolley, because that was my normal, to always have a child to look
at and to make eye contact with so I didn't have to communicate with the
rest of the world.
"If that's all it is, to send your kid to nursery and go and do that shopping
trip by yourself, do that because those are the little things that scare us.
There is nothing nicer than being on the other side of fear, so anyone who is

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