I love food, adore being in the kitchen and am happy to cook. But the day doesn’t have enough gaps in it for me to do much shopping, and the evening – with battles over homework, the unchecked-off list of things I was meant to do, the calls I was supposed to return – doesn’t yield much time to cook. But I must eat, and eat well – or else what is the point of it all? And then there are the people who need to be fed. I don’t mention them grudgingly. I love to feed people, and rare is the person who comes into my home and leaves without a foil parcel of something from the kitchen.

ON DINNER PARTIES

There are few things so likely to put a strain on the working day as knowing that you’ve got people coming over for supper a few minutes after you’ve walked through the front door, with barely time to take your coat off. It is mainly during the week that I have friends over for supper. Weekends can get taken over by my children’s social life. In a midweek supper party no one expects the grand treatment. And I always, always prefer the mood to be informal.

Substitutes for a starter

Make life easier by dispensing with a starter. It’s not just that you don’t want the extra cooking, but neither do you want an extra course’s worth of washing-up.

It can help to have some food for people to pick at over a drink or two: it means you can get on with putting supper together calmly, and it keeps everyone happy.

I buy some salami, uncut and still in sausage form, as well as some sliced, and arrange it with a knife or two on a wooden board. Parmesan, bought in a wedge and then cut into crumbly hunks, is another labour-light way of feeding people when they arrive.

Slightly higher up the effort scale is to buy frozen edamame beans from a store that sells Japanese foodstuffs. These are soy-beans in the pod, which you boil for about 5 minutes from frozen and then sprinkle lavishly, if unfashionably, with rock salt before podding them and then popping their jade beans into the mouth, while still warm.

Buy a tub of hoummos, mix it with half its volume of Greek yoghurt, stir in a little ground cumin and grated lemon zest, then drizzle with olive oil, scatter with pomegranate seeds and serve with breadsticks or sliced pitta. Or buy a good tub of lemony (preferably organic) mayonnaise and grate in a little garlic and set an array of raw vegetables on the table to dip into it. If you can’t face chopping vegetables, then go heavy on sugar-snaps instead.

Above all, be relaxed. I know it’s always an irritating injunction, but this should be a supper with friends, around a table, with you able to enjoy them. Food always helps, but even when a dinner’s gone wrong you can still have a great evening.

Advance planning

I don’t have a vigorous doit-ahead plan of attack, but I try to take some of the steps early. I stash steaks and chicken portions into marinades so that I’ve got something ready to be flung on a griddle without forethought at the end of the day. And the one thing I feel utterly beaten by when I’m really tired is the idea of peeling and chopping onions. I don’t find it difficult, but the thought is a daunting one. So, when I have time to spare, I peel, chop and fry onions slowly and gently to a gorgeous mush which can be frozen in cubes and then thawed to form the basis for a stew or sauce when needed.

Low-maintenance puddings

I also like a small amount of quietly satisfying jar-filling in my life. It’s scarcely strenuous, deeply enjoyable and also means you have the wherewithal for pudding whenever you want at some unforeseen future point. I fill a jar with golden sultanas, pour Grand Marnier over them and let them steep. I’ve also been known to go the more traditional rum ’n’ raisin route, and very good they both are.

I put morello cherries and cherry brandy in a jar, and – a very recent innovation – mix dried cherries and berries (that’s how they are labelled) with a pomegranate liqueur called Pama. Any of these are exquisite tumbled over ice-cream.

ON PARTIES

Sometimes you have people over for supper; sometimes you have a party. And the trouble is that just because you’ve planned on giving this party, doesn’t mean you have the time to prepare for it. Count yourself lucky. I know that I have an overdeveloped antipathy to the formal and fancy, but not having much time to prepare means you are less likely to go over the top and more likely to throw an enjoyable party.

Ambiance

I have nothing against getting out the best china and making the table look beautiful, though any table groaning with food is beautiful, crockery be damned. I’m all for easy, simple touches. I drape all available surfaces – bookshelves, mantelpieces, side tables – with grapes and assorted fruits, aiming to evoke the bounty of a Roman bacchanalia; I want the guests to be surrounded by fruitful plenty, as if welcoming sumptuousness were just spilling out of every corner.

Flowers

Flowers should be present but modest: choose a panoply of smaller flowers that will fit in smaller vases. I mean little bottles, canisters, beakers and any receptacle that inspires. I like to use those small glass pots that fancy French yoghurts come in; and, eccentric as it sounds, empty cans – of Italian tomatoes, olives, chestnuts, golden syrup, exotic foreign ingredients, especially when the writing on the cans is in a different script – make fabulous vases, especially in profusion. And I am forever buying odd little jars and containers from eBay to dot about the place with a sprig or two of something beautiful.

Remember, it doesn’t have to be flowers: think parsley, rosemary, mint and any other foliage you can get your hands on. But, whatever you use, bear in mind that what works best is to have as many little pots as possible scattered about the place.

Drink

Kingsley Amis said that the three most depressing words in the English language were “red or white?” and I think of this every time I throw a party. It was whisky he wanted to drink, but you need not supply spirits – just add a drink that strikes a party note. If it’s a relatively restrained assembly in terms of numbers, get lots of dry fizzy wine and make sure it is properly chilled, then lay out a display of flavoured syrups, the sort that barmen keep behind their bar, and you can pour everyone their wine and let them experiment with the syrup of their choice.

My Monin syrups are beginning to look like a multicoloured army advancing across my kitchen; favourites to splosh into the sparkling wine are Rosé, Watermelon, Pomegranate and Passionfruit. I bring out a different range for Christmas parties (Cranberry, Winter Berry, Toffee Nut and Gingerbread) and I love these in beer, too. Speaking of which, if you’re serving beer as well at your party, which I think you should if it’s summer or if dancing is involved, make sure it’s so cold that it hurts.

Food

I never think you should make masses of different things. I go for a choice of three, but those three in abundance. Whatever bits and pieces you offer people to eat, it’s always worth baking trays of cocktail sausages in addition. Putting sausages in the oven and taking them out again scarcely counts as work. To make things easier still, use throw-away foil roasting trays. I have nothing against dotting the room with bought snacky things. My absolute favourite is the wasabi-coated peas you can sometimes find in specialist stores, but they do blow your head off, so perhaps they’re not for everyone.

My idea of razzle-dazzle is not that you are needily trying to impress everyone, but that you are conjuring up an evening that wows with the least amount of work possible.

Placement

I hate drawing up seating plans. If you have one, people become anxious about their position in the pecking order; if you don’t, they all hover about nervously, not sitting down or knowing what to do. So it’s a disaster either way.

I number each place and then fill a hat with another pile of numbers and get people to take a number on their way in. This way they know where to sit but don’t feel sensitive about their position. If you like to keep things girl-boy-girl-boy, then just do a pink set of numbers and a blue set of numbers and two hats or receptacles by the door.

ON THE STORE CUPBOARD

Many people believe that there are secret store-cupboard rules that, once applied, mean you never have to go shopping again and can cook anything and everything without a moment’s thought. It just isn’t so.

You must maintain a balance between having enough food to avoid shopping every day and having your cupboards sagging with cans you hardly ever want.

A diet made up of food that can be kept indefinitely wouldn’t be good for you. I like to know that I have sufficient supplies to make pasta and sauce for the children without a shopping expedition; that if I buy a roasting chicken, I’ve got some white beans to mash, along with the garlic or truffle oil; or that if someone drops in unexpectedly, I can construct some sort of pudding I had not planned on; but more than that and I fear that I am not filling a store cupboard but building a bunker.

Most of my short cuts involve infused oils, with garlic oil in pole position, wok oil the next most regularly used, and chilli oil third. I don’t mind buying them but if you want to make your own, it’s not hard.

Garlic oil: Chop up 8 garlic cloves and add to ½ litre of regular olive oil, then let it all steep for 48 hours before straining into a bottle (with a funnel, or you’ll waste your work).

Wok oil: Don’t use olive oil but 450ml sunflower or other vegetable oil, plus 50ml toasted sesame oil, 4 sliced cloves of garlic, a 6cm piece of ginger sliced, and strain after the 48 hours’ steeping.

Chilli oil: Take ½ litre vegetable oil and chop up 4 red chillis, and let them sit, seeds and all, in the oil before sieving after 48 hours, as with the other oils. You can flavour any oil as you wish, and although you don’t, strictly speaking, have to sieve out the bits I find it easier to do it at the beginning than have to think about it again.

I always have a barrage of beans and other pulses in the house: this means I have the wherewithal for a vegetable, a starter salad, a soup or protein for non meat-eaters. It’s important to use the freezer as an extension of the store cupboard, too. And I don’t just mean as a repository of made-up dishes that can be thawed, but for as many vegetables as possible. Don’t sniff: the vegetables in your deep freeze are likely to have far more nutrients than the veg lying optimistically at the bottom of your refrigerator.

Nigella Express, BBC2, Monday 3 September, 2007 at 8.30pm

© Nigella Lawson 2007 Nigella Express: Good Food Fast, Chatto & Windus, published on September 6 at £25 (£22 from Times BooksFirst 0870 1608080)

Read The Times Magazine’s interview with Nigella, and find other recipes here

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