Anjum Anand has Angelina Jolie lips, a cut-glass accent, glossy hair, a second cook book ready and her own prime-time cookery series starting on BBC Two next month. No wonder she’s been called the Nigella of Indian cuisine.

Oh, and she grew up in Switzerland, studied in Madrid and Paris, too, speaks fluent French, has a degree in business administration from London and a husband she met and married after “a typical Indian love story”.

At least this yummy mummy-ji isn’t infallible. Before I arrive at her Hampstead flat for lunch, her daughter Mahir, 2, had distracted her while she prepared the okra and the apronless cook claims to have burnt some. If there had been smoke and swearing earlier, there’s no sign of it now. And Anjum’s okra slivers are perfect: crisp and delicately spiced.

She wasn’t always as svelte as she appears now, in a wrap dress that would cling to any unwanted curves. Once Anjum, 35, was overweight. An omnivorous European upbringing, and what she believes is a “bad” metabolism, took its toll until she was in her twenties. Then, determined to slim, she decided to take what she ate into her own hands by teaching herself to cook Indian food her way; stripping it down to the barest of delicious essentials, reassembling and lightly cooking the freshest ingredients with as much flavour, only gentle spicing and as little fat as possible.

Background

• Coconut mackerel curry

• Broad bean thoran

• Lamb burgers with herbed yoghurt

• Simple Spinach and Lentil Curry

• Yoghurt-simmered fish

Anjum's top Indian bites

Being an Indian TV cook Anjum Anand is always asked where the best Indian food is in town, so she here she compiles her favourite Indian restaurants and food shops

Unlike any diet she’d tried, it worked. In a couple of years she had shed five stone. She learnt to cook with a light, contemporary touch what her North Indian family had eaten at home. Anjum lost the weight and found a profession in passing on what she’d discovered.

She dates the take-off of her TV career to the time she was filming live at eight months pregnant. “I didn’t care and it just clicked. I ignored the camera. Since then I’ve been a regular on the Sky channel UKTV Food and then I got a TV show.” As she talks nineteen to the dozen it’s obvious why the camera loves her.

Her first book, Indian Every Day (Headline, £12.99) came out in 2003, sold well and launched her as a cook. Her food appeals to women – and men – who want spiced food that isn’t meaty, oily and blow-torch hot. She keeps ingredients and cooking methods simple. “I try to pare down the spices as much as possible while retaining the authentic character because the more complicated it becomes the more someone will turn the page. Big elaborate curries are not what we eat at home.”

Although she has experienced working in restaurants – stints for a few months in the United States and in Delhi – her style is resolutely domestic. “Restaurant food is never, in any cuisine, healthy,” she says, defending Indian food against the gross misconceptions we have been fed by high-street curry houses. “I never understood why people said Indian food was heavy until I was at university and went for a curry. Then I saw how much oil restaurants use. The chefs have a different way of cooking; it’s not how I eat at home.”

After all, Indian food, as it has been cooked for centuries and eaten at home by frugal hard-working people, is healthy. Admittedly, she says, “it can be overcooked and complicated; where I come from they cook spinach for 45 minutes”. But with dead-easy recipes such as stir-fried spinach with tomato, she’s added 21st-century zest.

Her original mission was to cut back the fat. If anything, it worked too well. “I got a bit thin,” she says. Not dangerously so, but “when you are losing the weight you don’t know where to stop. I have been a size zero but it was not a healthy body weight for me.” Until she had a baby she was happy being between size 8 and 10. Now she’s a size 12, tops; but she’d like to go down a size and, like every woman she knows, struggles with her weight.

Rice, not meat, is the meal’s centrepiece

After a proper breakfast (Weetabix), her main meal of the day is lunch. The spinach, okra, rice, lentil dumplings and “five-seed” potatoes she has prepared certainly doesn’t sound like diet food. It’s not stodgy, but lovely, offering a subtly varied spread of tastes and textures. For herself, she cooks brown basmati rice and this, she says, not a hunk of protein, should form the centrepiece of a meal. In her books she recommends white basmati “because it’s a bit lighter and soaks up curries better”.

She’s serving gram flour dumplings in a yoghurt curry instead of the fish as she doesn’t cook meat at home. There’s no bread. “We don’t mix rice and bread, we eat one or the other.”

Her offer of ice-cream doesn’t carry much conviction. Just as well I refuse. “We don’t eat pudding in India.” As well as no spoon there’s no glass in front of her. “I don’t drink water with meals. It dilutes the acid in the stomach [that digests the meal]. Drink water before you eat and only sip during a meal.”

Showing firefighters healthy man food

After the success of her fat-reducing, spice-taming first book, the second advocates this balanced approach to Indian food to persuade the British public that it’s good for them. “People in this country are scared of cooking it. That’s what I’m trying to tackle. Start with simple things like lamb burgers – a spiced lamb kebab in a bun – and you’re getting people to cook things they’re familiar with.”

In the series she introduces firefighters, take-away-noshing old student friends, and visitors to a Dorset country fair to her style of food. Those firemen got lucky. The hot new TV cook, who seasons her conversation with the “Oh my God!” and “Are you crazy?” of an expensive European education, swished into their station and showed them how to cook “man food”.

Aubergines with yoghurt, lamb curry and fluffy naan – with a delicacy that bears no comparison with most takeaways – convinced them that Indian food needn’t leave a curry-loving firefighter feeling too sluggish to make an emergency exit. “They loved it.”

For all her success at controlling her weight, Anjum is surprisingly cavalier about some of the official tenets of healthy eating. Salt, for example. “I don’t look into how much salt I should be adding.” She doesn’t even accept that government recommendations are set in stone; opinion can change. Anyway, if you don’t eat salty snacks you can save the salt allowance for the times it matters, she says. “If you don’t add salt to Indian food it doesn’t come together. Even a good dish underseasoned can be quite bland. Salt and fat are conductors of flavour.”

Anjum always cooks with safflower oil (similar to sunflower oil), but admits that “butter goes really well with lentils” and even, unfashionably, puts in a good word for ghee (clarified butter). “I think modern science has it wrong and soon they’re going to say ghee is healthy.” At an Ayurvedic spa in Malta last summer she was put on a ghee detox. “I was like: Are you crazy? I wanted to lose the baby weight.” Given increasing doses for breakfast, by the last day she could happily swallow nine tablespoons of pure fat. “I looked, like, six years younger.” That’s one Indian diet tip of Anjum’s I don’t think I’ll try at home.

Indian Food Made Easy , BBC Two, July 9, 8.30pm. The book of the series (Quadrille, £14.99) is available from Times BooksFirst, £13.50: 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

For more delicious recipes and tips visit Anjum Anand at Times Online and www.anjumanand.co.uk

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