An evening with Tara Wigley. Knee deep in tahini: fifteen years of writing with Yotam Ottolenghi with some rhyming recipes.
Tara will talk about how she got into the world of food – from turning up at The Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland to working six months later in Yotam Ottolenghi’s home kitchen with him, testing and writing recipes together. Fifteen years, eight cook books and countless recipes and newspaper columns later, Tara will talk about being Ottolenghi’s writing collaborator and how she juggles this with her own passion for writing fun rhymes about food. She will read a little section from both of her solo books, ‘How to Butter Toast’ and ‘How the Cookie Crumbles’ and then demo a quick and fuss-free recipe that she loves – no cooking, just food processing! – in the hope that it prompts anyone to add it to their own cooking repertoire.
Our Speaker
Tara worked in publishing for the best part of a decade before switching to food and writing in 2010. Initially testing recipes with Yotam, she soon became his writing collaborator. Tara was very involved in the creation of Plenty More (2014) and is credited on the title page with the writing of The NOPI Cookbook (2015), the re-launched edition of the first Ottolenghi Cookbook (2016), Sweet (2017) and Flavour (2020). She is the co-author of Simple (2018) andComfort (2024), with Yotam Ottolenghi and Falastin (2020), with Sami Tamimi.
In addition to her work with Ottolenghi, Tara also writes rhymes about food. Her first collection, ‘How to Butter Toast’, was published in 2023 and described by The Wall Street Journal as having ‘the makings of a modern classic. Imagine the literary lovechild that might have resulted had Dr Seuss eloped with Elizabeth David. Smuggled within the sing-song is a trove of know-how … in other words: she’s got chops.’ How the Cookie Crumbles’ was published in 2025 to similar acclaim.