Rukmini Iyer – Favourite Things

Rukmini Iyer is an author, recipe writer and food stylist. She shot to fame with The Roasting Tin cookbook series, which uses just one roasting tin for a range of delicious, no-fuss recipes. The best-selling series has now sold over one million copies and includes The Roasting Tin, The Green Roasting Tin, The Quick Roasting Tin and The Roasting Tin Around the World. She also styles food and writes recipes for brands and publications including The Guardian, Waitrose and Fortnum and Mason, and works as a home economist for television commercials and feature films. Her latest cookbook, The Sweet Roasting Tin, is out now.

These are a few of Rukmini Iyer’s favourite things. 

Baking

I’ve been known to make emergency welsh rarebit muffins at midnight (Nigella’s recipe, and no doubt her influence). I will always have the wherewithal to make cakes or biscuits in the house – running low on self-raising flour counts as a kitchen emergency. Luckily, some creativity comes from running out of ingredients – on the rare occasion there’s no butter, it means a chocolate olive oil cake, and my best-ever banana bread happened because I’d run out of eggs – it’s a vegan orange chocolate chip version, and so light and fluffy you’d never notice the difference. I like to experiment with different flours nowadays too – pancakes will almost always be half and half spelt and wheat flour, and rye flour gives a lovely depth to savoury muffins. Which I’m off to make for lunch now (roasted tomato and ricotta with thyme). 

Dogs

I adore dogs, and particularly my own, a tricolour border collie called Pepper. She’s two and a half years old and she astonishes me most days with her grasp of language and increasing trainability – we’ve gone from a puppy who thought recall was a game that involved prancing just out of reach for long enough that we’d occasionally get locked in London parks (climbing over a fence to escape, once I’d successfully rugby tackled her down), to one who now trots down the street off-lead right next to my heel, looking at passing cats and then me with a “can I?” and resigning herself when I shake my head. Ideally, we’d have a houseful of rescue collies. 

Golden Hour

I’m slightly obsessed with good lighting, rating everything from supermarkets to restaurants on how subtly lit they are. Fluorescent, white overhead light is the enemy. My favourite time of day is golden hour, around 6 pm when the sunlight makes everything glow and look beautiful – it’s my favourite time to have a drink outside (and usually holler up to my partner to finish work and come and enjoy the light). It’s also an excellent time for photography. 

Gardening

I’m an amateur but keen gardener. I have to exercise extreme caution when passing a garden centre or the display outside Waitrose, or the dog has to ride home surrounded by plant pots on the back seat. As it’s our first year in the new garden, I sagely read all the advice on leaving everything be so you can see how it progresses before starting to garden the following year. 

Then I ignore the advice, bringing home two massive hauls of delphiniums, alliums, scented still-flowering David Austin roses, cosmos, agapanthus, clematis, passionflowers and jasmine from the nearby Secret Garden, and enlarging a bed for them once I got in. The slugs were delighted, but after three weeks of beer traps (Stella and Carlsberg), the population seems under control.

Wine

Is there anything better than a glass of wine with friends and family? Perhaps wine with a bowl of Torres truffle crisps or a little miniature Croque Monsieur sandwich. That moment when you sit down at lunch with a friend, and they say, “shall we order a bottle?” Yes. Yes, definitely. 

Fortunately, I’ve developed a simultaneous taste for sparkling water, particularly alongside red wine, so the hydration levels stay up. Wine compliments food and company like nothing else – before we moved, we loved getting recommendations from Neil in our local wine shop (his top sparkling wine tip, which I pass on to you, is the Louis Roederer Quartet – absolutely delicious).

Enjoyed Rukmini Iyer’s favourites? Explore the full Favourite Things archive here.