Dinner Lady - Shannon Denny

Forget baking tins and puff pastry - when I sit down to talk to Acton's Jo Pratt I wonder if we might soon be in need of towels and hot water. It's three days till her second cookery book, In the Mood for Entertaining, lands on shop shelves and just a week before her second child is due to enter the world. "I'll keep my legs crossed!" she giggles.

A warm, light-hearted personality and the ability to juggle a seriously critical timeline is precisely how Jo first made a name for herself. She has worked in the kitchens of superchefs such as Gary Rhodes, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and John Torode on everything from live cookery demonstrations and books to TV programmes like Hell's Kitchen.

She hails from Melton Mowbray, "the land of pork pies, and actually a very foodie town," where even as a child she felt destined to cook. "Right from a young age I just loved food. I bumped into my primary school's cook a few months ago. 'Ooh,' she said, 'Jo, it's lovely to see how well things are going for you. I remember when you used to come to the kitchen at school asking me for recipes!'"

These days, it's Jo's own recipes that are in demand. She's food editor of Glamour and contributes weekly to the Daily Mail Weekend magazine. She also appears on ITV's Saturday Cooks, UKTV's Market Kitchen and Sky One's Taste. Just in time for her book/baby due date, she has finished filming Daily Cooks Challenge with Antony Worrall Thompson too. Jo's debut book, In the Mood for Food, convinced Waterstone's to name her one of their Authors for the Future, and the follow-up will no doubt convince them they made the right choice. "It's different recipes that would work for different occasions, situations or circumstances," she says. The emphasis is on ease and impact - macaroons in the "Tea for Two" chapter, for example, take 45 minutes and require just six easy-to-find ingredients.

For her own ingredients, convenience is key, so she's a fan of Turnham Green Terrace. "I love going down there because you can do your whole shop. You've got the butchers, deli, fishmongers, greengrocers - everything that you need. For me, for work, it's ideal." She likes eating out too. "You get a lot of inspiration. Since having my previous baby we haven't been travelling out as far to eat, which is obviously great because you've got so many places to go in Chiswick." She rates the Duke of Sussex for family outings and La Trompette for a treat. Who's on dinner duty when the baby arrives? "My husband is a good cook luckily!" she assures me.

Once things calm down, she'll continue writing but is looking forward to some time off. From behind her nearly nine-month bump, she says, "Getting that nice balance between family and work is hard, but important to me." Quite right, I think, relieved to find we've made it through the interview without a midwife.

We have five copies of In the Mood For Entertaining by Jo Pratt to give away. For a chance to win, tell us the name of one of the TV programmes Jo appears in. Send your answer, along with your name and address, to westsidecomp@archant.co.uk.

Members Comments

There are no comments for this article.

Add a Comment

Please log in to post a comment.