Quotes from Prue Leith

My first taste memory is of our nanny in South Africa making white bread sandwiches with salad cream, which was potato mashed with a cheap mayonnaise thing with bits in it of - I suppose - pickled cucumber. I absolutely loved them.

I came through the Sixties so I was perfectly aware of drug-taking but I came from South Africa and we were brought up in quite an old-fashioned way. If I went to a rave or a party, I'd be behind the barbecue flipping the burgers. I wasn't out there partying.

I love writing fiction and can do it anywhere - I once even missed a flight because I was so engrossed.

Why don't women say what they want, why wait to be asked? Do women intuit that it is unacceptable to appear ambitious?

I'm nicknamed the 'food tsar' by the press. I'm always giving my opinion on things like; 'Don't nanny children,' although children sometimes do need a nanny. Being a judge on 'Great British Menu' reinforces this image of me.

I am very in favour of children having a nap after lunch because then they're not whiney and grizzly by six o'clock.

It was hugely helpful to me, being South African. I have never felt uncomfortable in posh society because I don't see what it is that I'm meant to be bowing the knee about.

At barbecues, people just like to eat a lot of meat; it's extraordinary. They eat far more than they normally would at a dinner party.

We had two children, who are still adored, they adore me and we're very close. Rayne was 20 years older than me. He died when he was 80, so he had a really good life.

An awful lot of older women do have love affairs or wish they were having love affairs.

My worst habit is opening the fridge and thinking: 'I'd like to eat something.'

I'm an optimist - very glass half-full.

If you eat good ingredients, and moderately, it should not be a problem. If you look at the bakers over the years, how many obese bakers have there been? There have been a few - nobody's saying you can't join 'Bake Off' if you're obese - but by and large bakers, just like cooks, are not particularly overweight.

I am not saying celebrity chefs don't encourage children to cook. However, their programmes are so entertaining, you end up stuffing your face with Pot Noodles instead of learning from them.

I went to the Sorbonne in Paris for two years and read all the classics by authors like Victor Hugo and Guy de Maupassant. I was supposed to read them in French but I cheated and used the English versions instead.

It takes several doses of any veg before children like it, but once they do they'll like it for life. You wouldn't give up on a child who didn't want to learn to read. Learning to eat is every bit as important.

Very few parents give out healthy lunchboxes due to pressure from their children.

Children aren't being taught to cook or encouraged to try things or told why food is important.

I'm quite lazy. I don't want to learn a new subject like shipbuilding.

I fall for all those lists of 100 books you must read, and go out and buy most of them.