National Vegetarian Week this year was laden with celebrity supporters. Two of them were TV chefs, Si King and Dave Myers – also known as The Hairy Bikers. We spoke to them about what they’ve been cooking during lockdown, their latest veggie dishes, favourite kitchen gadgets and loads more.

With the current pandemic, many people are reverting to traditional weekly shopping and stocking up on food that lasts. What veggie store cupboard staples are always on your shopping list?

Dave Myers: I would say flour is the one thing that I have really used during this lockdown. Different types of grains: spelt, wheat, rye. I’ve made sourdough bread – you really put a lot of love and intensity to that. Bread can be very wonderful with a bit of olive oil, balsamic, some butter if you are not vegan – it’s one of the great joys. During lockdown I have been baking all our bread and I have just got into the habit of it now, three times a week. And the more you do it the better you get at it.

Si King: Pulses, always! I go through so many pulses. And carrots, onions, celery, tinned chickpeas, nutritional yeast flakes, stock, tofu – all that sort of stuff. Also chillies and garlic. I like experimenting and messing about, like with aquafaba water from the chickpeas. I would say 85% of my diet is veg-based.

The Hairy Bikers partnered with National Vegetarian Week again this year, which due to current situations had to change its theme at quite late notice to ‘National Vegetarian Week at Home’. What have you missed most while being in lockdown?

SK: I am quite a cuddly human being so I like cuddling people and giving them a kiss – man or woman, doesn’t matter to me. I’ve missed that interaction with my family. And Dave, of course. He’s great – well he’s family!

DM: Travel. I’ve missed my garden in France. I planned to grow my own vegetables this year. I have a house in France, and the garden was all seeded out. Then I went back to England, got stuck in lockdown, and it’s gone to rack and ruin. I had 85 different varieties of veg all grown from seed, in order to grow enough veg for a year and be self-sufficient for myself and my family. I have gone back to France now trying to sort out the garden. Oh, and obviously missing Kingie.

And what have you enjoyed most about being in lockdown?

DM: I’ve really enjoyed having time to bake bread and make some more complicated dishes. Time to really utilise what Si and I have learnt over the past 20 years cooking together and feed the family, that’s been the best thing.

SK: Having the time and space to actually reflect on the life we’ve had. This is the longest I have been in one place for 20 years, so it has been quite nice.

Where was the last place you went before lockdown, and what foodie treasures did you discover there?

DM: The Rennes food market in France – it is absolutely joyous, whatever you want is there. I do it as a complete day out. I go on a Friday, check into a cheap hotel, have a night out in Rennes, and then the next morning you wake up and the biggest food market in Europe has just erupted around you. I go with an open mind and come back with bags full of stuff. I get dead excited to see what there is and what to do with it.

SK: The last place I went was Sydney in Australia in February. I looked into the vegan scene there with my two boys, James and Dylan, as James is vegan. We tried some very interesting Asian cuisines.

What veggie meal have you and your family been enjoying most while you have been confined to the house?

DM: Homemade pasta. The old classic with roasted butternut squash in a ravioli with a sage butter and olive oil sauce and a few capers. It’s absolutely joyous you know. I love experimenting with Italian food, gnocchi, ravioli. I made some ravioli the other day with cracked black pepper pasta – rolling the pasta out, but with pepper in it so it was speckled.

SK: My son has a pop-up restaurant called Cantina serving very authentic Oaxacan/Mexican food, so we’ve been enjoying Mexican feasts on a regular basis. He doesn’t say that his food is vegan or vegetarian or anything like that – he just lets the food speak for itself and it’s mind blowing. They decided to use the time for research and development and expand their menu during the lockdown, which seems to have worked very well, because we’ve been eating some amazing food [laughs].

Why do you think should people cook from scratch?

SK: It’s cheaper, it’s healthier and it’s more creative. You do need some sort of food knowledge, and not everybody has that. That’s why we need educational food outreach programmes. It doesn’t need to be complicated, just give people an opportunity to feed and nourish their families with good food that’s not processed.

DM: Health. I’ve had to think very carefully about health, as did Si. I was pre-diabetic in 2008 and I kept it under control with diet. With good fresh ingredients – some tomatoes from the greenhouse, some garlic, some red onions, olive oil, salt and pepper – it’s simple, and it’s fantastic. You might save a few quid as well.

What do you think is the most versatile vegetable and what dishes do you choose to make with it?

DM: I’ve got two really. Potatoes and cauliflower. I think the potato is much maligned because it’s here all the time – we seem to have spuds with everything. But it’s versatile – baked in the oven, smothered with olive oil, salt and pepper – it’s great for a quick meal. There’s no better comfort food than a bowl of chips. The potato makes great salads, gnocchi, latkes – it’s very versatile. So is cauliflower. I am a great advocate of cauliflower rice – Si and I were making that before it became fashionable. It’s nice roasted. Then there’s cauliflower steak, fritters, purée… it is a lovely versatile vegetable.

SK: For me, well… everything starts with an onion, doesn’t it? [laughs] And there’s nothing better than sautéing an onion in the pan, then adding the garlic… oh happy days! As they have been in season, I have also been enjoying runner beans, I absolutely love them. And green beans. The broad beans are just about to come in. I have also been eating a lot of beetroot. I will not waste food, all my food waste goes to compost.

So do you try and use every part of the vegetable?

SK: Yes. It blows my mind that supermarkets throw beet leaves out – they are the best bit. They are fantastic. You can sauté with them, you can boil them, they are just amazing. And the beetroot stems – I put some beetroot stems with some vinegar, some star anise and slices of garlic and a little bit of sugar just to take the acidity off. It’s amazing.

DM: When I make gnocchi, I bake and scoop out the potato, but then drizzle the potato skins with oil and some chilli and just crisp them up, they’re fantastic. I certainly don’t waste that. And don’t forget vegetable stocks. Roast the veg off first to make a dark stock.

If you hadn’t become a chef, what would you have been?

SK: I was a musician, playing drums and percussion, prior to my career behind the camera and then in front of it. I have a band called Little Moscow and we have been playing music together for 40 years on an amateur basis, but it has got quite serious recently. We were doing festivals and all that stuff pre-pandemic.

DM: I was a makeup artist in the film industry, but I got disillusioned with that. Had I gone into it earlier, I’d have been an antique dealer. For about a year I had a break from telly and had an antique shop in the Highlands. I still love my antiques.

What do you enjoy most when it comes to developing a recipe and writing a cookbook?

SK: The collaboration – and the creativity. We’ve got a great team of people we collaborate with, and we are all passionate about food. I love it.

DM: At the start Si and I will come up with ideas and we will start to knock them around over a pint or something and just talk about food – and make each other ridiculously hungry. Si and I are working on a book now about vegetarian food and it’s really exciting. The growth of interest in vegetarian and vegan food is brilliant because there is something for everybody. My daughter is vegetarian and when we go somewhere to eat, no longer is it just goat’s cheese tartlet or mushroom risotto. People have had to pull their socks up and think more. A lot of the meals we have written for the book have got loads of flavour. We haven’t been scared of some of them having quite a few ingredients – I want to build the layers of flavours and textures. I also love finding simple ideas that work. For example, I love a cheese scone and I love Marmite or yeast extract, so we worked out a recipe for cheese and marmite scones. They were absolutely fantastic.

And is the cheese and Marmite scones recipe likely to make it into the book?

DM: Oh, yes. I would be most disappointed if it doesn’t.

TV: Have you developed any recipes you have had to abandon because they haven’t worked?

DM: Yes. Remember I told you about the cracked black pepper ravioli? What I didn’t tell you was only half of them worked. The cracked pepper caused little holes in my pasta sheet, which meant the filling leaked. The half that worked were great, but the other half were a bit of a mess. It was fine for the family, but that one won’t make it to the book!

Have you got a favourite kitchen utensil?

SK: I have a hand-mill coffee grinder I use for my peppercorns. And I love my knives – you can’t cook unless you have got sharp knives. And my knife sharpener, I couldn’t live without that.

DM: I have got a steam oven I find very useful. It’s great for baking bread and you get a lovely crust, or steaming veg, making sticky rice, dumplings. It is just the best thing for preserving the flavour of veg.

Who has inspired you most in your life?

DM: I think in terms of food it’s definitely Si. I have known Si for 30 years now, but on the subject of food we have never bored each other.

SK: I would say my mum, and Che Guevara probably.

That’s quite a combo! Did you learn cooking from your mum?

SK: Yeah. I grew up in a working class household in the back streets of the North Durham coalfields, so it wasn’t anything special, but my mam was a special cook. My dad was in the merchant service so I had a supply of odd ingredients. My mam was cooking with star anise and lemongrass in the late 50s. My dad travelled a lot, and I’m following in his footsteps, which is why lockdown has been so interesting. I thought I would have difficulty with it, but I actually haven’t. It’s been nice to get into a routine.

What do you think is the future of food in a post-pandemic world? Will there be changes?

SK: I sincerely hope there will be changes. Our planet is finite and I sincerely hope we change our attitudes. I think the swell of popular opinion is towards a more sustainable food future and we have the power to change it.

DM: I think shopping habits have changed, people going back to the one big shop a week rather than just popping out three times a week. When you do a shop like that I think people tend to think more carefully about what they buy, and also think more about waste. I also think people will be cooking and eating at home more, since the takeaways haven’t been there to depend on. I think generally people are more and more concerned about the planet, and certainly there is no escaping the fact that meat is contributing to this. I think in a hundred years meat-eating will be one of those quirky things we used to do. The way smoking is going now.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about all of your latest lockdown culinary adventures at home.

DM: Thank you.

SK: It’s my greatest of pleasure.