Sara Davies: 'I get up at silly o'clock to do the turkey'
My first food memory was my mam making Christmas cake. While she was doing that, she’d sit me and my sister down by the TV and we’d watch The Snowman. And she’d give us a little wedge of marzipan to keep us quiet. Sara Davies, 41, Dragons’ Den star,Growing up near Durham, my mam did all the cooking. Proper, traditional English food; anything that could be put in the slow cooker, like beef and Guinness stew. She met my dad when she started university but ended up dropping out early. Later, when she was doing the Open University, my dad was left with me and my sister for a week. God love him, he had no clue. So we were at McDonald’s every night.There was a lot of sloppiness when it came to school food. Everything came in green plastic, and we’d have to queue for ages to get cake with custard, or blooming semolina. But it did get us through the day.I wouldn’t say my mam was strict, but while we could have an unlimited amount of raisins, it wasn’t the same with sweets. When I had my sons Oliver and Charlie [now aged 11 and nine], she always had a packet of Cadbury’s Buttons in her bag. I was like, ‘I can’t believe it. We only ever had Buttons on special occasions and now you have them in your handbag every time you see them!’ She said, ‘Well, it’s Grandma privilege.’I don’t really like tomatoes, raw or cooked. I think it’s just the texture. I love tomato soup, and they’re fine in ketchup or sauce, but I just can’t eat them whole.I love to cook if I’m not under any pressure to do it. I like making the Christmas dinner and having the world and his wife round. I also enjoy prepping the night before and getting up at stupid o’clock to put the turkey in. I always make bread sauce, even though it’s only me and my mam who eat it! Sara loves making the festive feastI’ve perfected a mean lasagne and a lovely side of salmon. But I can’t invite people over too often as I only have those dishes. And when veggie friends visit, I’m useless. I did a veggie lasagne one day and my husband said, ‘What is this? It’s no good.’I drank plenty at university, but I never had bad hangovers. I put it down to always getting cheesy chips at the pizza shop on the way home. I think the stodginess of the chips and the fresh air from the walk meant I was always right as rain the next day.I did cook at uni, in the loosest sense of the word. I bought a frying pan and saucepan from a pound shop, so you can imagine the quality. We virtually lived on pasta. When we got our student loan at the start of term, we made it with nice sauces but by the end of the term, it’d be pasta with butter and a bit of grated cheese, if you were lucky.When I was doing Strictly Come Dancing, we’d go to a local restaurant called The Scruffy Duck in Norton in Stockton-on-Tees. Aljaz [Skorjanec] loved getting oysters, but I made sure he sampled local Teesside delicacies such as a chicken parmo!My comfort food is my mam’s amazing pulled pork, which we have in a nice bun. All the family comes over and we sit anywhere we can find as there are no emergency chairs, and the grandkids run around having fun. Buttons are her 'mam's' chocolate treatI’m approaching the perimenopause, so I eat protein, such Greek yogurt and cottage cheese, like it’s going out of fashion. I also have this special sea-moss gel that’s supposed to be good for you, so I hide it in smoothies, spag bol and everything else.When we filmed Dragons’ Den in Manchester city centre, the Dragons had different orders. Some liked Pizza Express, others sushi. But I like to eat with the crew, so I’d have what they were having. Whenever we could, we Dragons would try to have a meal together at The Ivy there and one time Steven [Bartlett] and I got a huge wagyu steak that we didn’t finish, so I took it home to eat the next day. I hate waste!My last supper would be a huge Thai takeaway: green curry and all the rest. But nothing too spicy.Sara Davies’ Christmas Craft Off is on Fridays at 2pm on ITV1
