Delicious new cooking show to premiere
The show's warm format, including its colourful kitchen with personal touches, makes one feel at home with Alice.
Food maven Alice Zaslavsky is the host of a joyful new nightly cooking show on the ABC A Bite to Eat with Alice which premieres on Monday. In each episode, Zaslavsky cooks alongside a celebrity, offering accessible, delicious recipes and expert tips for cooking in your own kitchen.
Speaking to The AJN, Zaslavsky said, “The premise of it is that you come in, you tell me what you like, you tell me what you don’t like, and I curate a menu of recipes that are relatable and accessible, and anyone can cook them, and then we just cook them together and have a good chat.”
On how this show differs from other cooking shows, Zaslavsky commented, “The show is something that we all need, because I think we’ve all kind of looked at people like Sammy J. or John Safran and wondered … if I invited them for dinner, what would they be like?”
She said Safran had requested more Ashkenazi food, “So I did matzah ball soup, and we did a whole roasted cauliflower ala Miznon … It was a very on-brand menu for us both.”
The show’s warm format, including its colourful kitchen with personal touches makes one feel at home with Alice.
“A lot of the reason why people are natural cooks is because they’ve seen cooking taking place in their household. And this is a show where you can watch it and feel like cooking is going on in the household because things go wrong, we troubleshoot them, it’s a mess and that’s relatable.
“It’s kind of role modelling what it means to cook together in the kitchen and to eat together and to joyfully meet food and meet people where they are,” she said.
Celebrity guests often discuss what special dishes mean to them personally, including their heritage.
Zaslavsky said she often draws on her cultural background in her cooking. “I was born in Georgia, but I’ve got Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Jewish heritage.”
Zaslavsky is also known for embracing “thrifting” – the stretching out of food, which is helpful for people facing cost of living pressures.
“There’s peasant style food in all different cuisines. And I really think that it’s time for us to go back to that, making the most of it, using what you’ve got before you go out to the shops,” she said.
“For a while there, I think we got a little bit fancy and a little bit too aspirational, whereas now I think it is time to go back to relatable cooking, and the cooking that our bubbas and zaidas made generations ago.”
Zaslavsky said she learnt tips from her mum, a thrifty cook who would say, “You can always find something to do with your leftovers,” noting she would take tzimmes carrots and turn them into a carrot cake.
After appearing on MasterChef 12 years ago and a series of successful cookbooks and radio/television stints, she describes her new show as bashert – meant to be. She reflected that when she went on Masterchef, “All I knew is that helping to connect people with food – and particularly at that point when I was a teacher, connecting kids with food – just felt really correct and meaningful and purposeful for me in my life.
“So, the fact that I get to add value now for millions of Australians who are going to be watching this show and interacting with it … I’m very here for it.”
A Bite to Eat with Alice premieres on October 28 at 6pm on ABC TV, with all episodes available to stream on ABC iview.
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