Ottolenghi’s recipe tester Claudine Boulstridge: My children ‘grew up on Yotam’s food’ – so they’re not fussy

3 hours ago
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Wales-based Boulstridge has been working with Ottolenghi for nearly two decades, and is releasing her debut cookbook.

If you don’t want your children to become fussy eaters, why not wean them on a steady diet of Yotam Ottolenghi recipes?

That’s what Claudine Boulstridge did – but not necessarily by design. French-British chef Boulstridge has been Ottolenghi’s recipe tester for 17 years now – meaning that pretty much every recipe from his cookbooks or Guardian column have come through Boulstridge’s Welsh kitchen before going out to the masses.

“They grew up on Yotam’s foods,” Boulstridge says of her three children, now aged 10, 12 and 15. “They would eat the recipe testing with us, or I would even blitz it up when they were tiny and couldn’t chew everything.

“So they’ve had every vegetable” – which Boulstridge, 45, suggests has “helped” them become adventurous, unfussy eaters.

Plus, some French attitudes to food has permeated Boulstridge’s household just outside Cardiff.

“I’m half French, so I grew up in the French way of: you ate exactly what your parents ate, and you would never give [children] something else,” she explains.

“There were no menus where you were giving them different things in French restaurants. It’s little things like that – if you start them from young having just a starter, or sharing your main, or something like that, then they get used to it.”

Boulstridge’s children have been to school in France, and also found the lunches there were vastly different to what her kids get in Wales.

“They literally have mussels on the menu and octopus, and the most unbelievable stuff that they would never serve here – so they have a massive advantage. Their kids are not going to be fussy because [of what] they’re being served at school.

“Here, if they’re being served chicken nuggets, your kid might come home and say, ‘Well, I quite like that. Can I have some chicken nuggets?'”

She remembers her youngest “begging for more curry and really strong flavours” that people might not think to give their children, but her mentality was “to give them absolutely everything”.

Boulstridge met Ottolenghi at the prestigious Leiths School of Food and Wine, where they were both teaching: “Then 17 years later, he’s still sending me recipes every week, so my family are very lucky and get to eat all of his food for free.”

She bonded with Ottolenghi over their shared love of bold flavours – which Boulstridge got a taste for in her childhood, moving every three years all over the world due to her father’s work as an engineer.

Boulstridge says she “loved” Ottolenghi’s recipes, explaining: “I’d grown up in the Middle East for part of my childhood, so I loved all the Middle Eastern-style flavours – it reminded me of that. And he obviously loves Mediterranean-style food, which was what I had at home.”

The chef set up her Instagram account @healthyfamilyfoodideas in 2016 as a “food diary” for herself, combining her passions for cooking and photography. Her children were smaller then, and she says it served as a way to “remind myself when they like a recipe” – with a focus on healthy, easy recipes that are full of flavour but won’t involve lots of time or washing up.

Now, Boulstridge’s account has over 48k followers, and it’s helped lead her to writing her debut cookbook, called Family, where there is the same focus on nutritious and simple dishes.

“Even though I’m a chef, there is hardly any chopping” in the recipes, Boulstridge suggests. “It’s mostly one pan, because I can only have so much washing up – I’m drowning in it every day with recipe testing. I don’t want extra washing up.”

Claudine Boulstridge with her three kids — Boulstridge with her three kids (Hannah Edwards/PA)

There are also other qualifications for Boulstridge’s recipes. “I needed a lot of it to be portable, so when it was ever nice weather in Wales: oh my goodness, we’re going to the beach after school, so I need a dinner then, because they’re [her kids] starving and we’re not coming back until later. So I needed to be portable, same with snacks.

“Everything I was designing was for me, for my lifestyle, for my three kids – for on the go, for I’m hungry, but you need something nutritious. I feel like it’s my family in a book, it’s everything we’ve eaten over the past 15 years, condensed down.”

And Boulstridge really put those recipes to the test in the past few months, after breaking 13 bones in her wrist snowboarding.

“My husband didn’t even cook once, so I did everything with my left hand, or I did all the tricks that I learned over the years,” she recounts.

“So I’ve always bought frozen vegetables, whether it’s frozen roasted vegetables or chopped onions, if you don’t want to chop onions. A lot of my one-pan dishes, you put all the vegetables in a food processor, blitz it up and then cook it in one tray – so there was hardly any washing up, because washing up with one hand is not easy either.

“So everything I already did, went to another level… All those tricks were paying off, and I cooked every single night since I broke my arm, with smashed-up bones in my wrist.”

Ultimately, the snowboarding accident forced her to be “even more creative”, saying: “It made me force myself to make things even easier… I’ve got recipes that I wish were in my book that I’ve done the past four months since I broke my arm. Maybe that’s book number two.”