‘easy’ book is low on labour

“It keeps me busy, mentally stimulated, it keeps me going in the absence of being busy elsewhere . . . And thankfully I’ve got a book coming out, so that will distract me.”

Called Simply: Easy Everyday Dishes, the book is Ghayour’s fifth, promising recipes that are “big on flavour, low on labour” and packed with the Iranian-born cook’s trademark Persian flavours.

“The point about Simply is not that it’s like my ‘easy’ book — my recipes have always been easy,” she says. “I’m known for cooking Middle Eastern food, but if you ask Middle Eastern people, ‘Is she making Middle Eastern food?’, they’ll probably go, ‘No, she isn’t’. I don’t know if it’s East, I don’t know if it’s West, it’s simply Sabrina.”

That means lots of marinated meats and hearty stews alongside slow-cooked veggies, crunchy salads, fragrant soups and Persian classics like tahchin crispy rice cake and tahdig e makaroni, a borrowed-fromthe-Italians baked spaghetti cake.

Recently, Ghayour has been particularly enjoying the simplicity of 10minute tandoori salmon and tepsi tray kebabs (“When you’re too lazy to shape kebabs and fry them you just mix, mix, mix, smoosh it in a pan, shove it in the oven, cut a slice of it, done”), and believes that when it comes to recipes, you’ve got to put the reader first.

“I’ve quickly realised if you’re not cooking it at home, don’t expect the other people to cook it. Trust is a big thing for me, I want to always have the trust of people who buy my books, and their confidence. “It’s a very privileged position to be, that people think, ‘Oh Sabrina that sounds absolutely disgusting, but because it’s you I’ll give it a go’,” she says, citing bacon and salad cream as a weird but wonderful combination she loves.

“Then they come back and say, ‘Oh my god, you were right’.”

Simply: Easy Everyday Dishes by Sabrina Ghayour, photography by Kris Kirkham, is published by Mitchell Beazley, priced £26 (octopusbooks.co.uk).