You're Cooked: no-stove recipe book for intoxicated chefs

Did you know that 25% of house fires start in the kitchen and 50% of fatal house fires involve alcohol or drugs?

To help intoxicated people stay off the stove, Fire and Emergency NZ has created the online recipe book You're Cooked.

All recipes for You're Cooked were designed to "hit" the usual late-night cravings, says Auckland chef Jamie Robert Johnston who worked on the project with the advertising agency Motion Sickness.

"A bit of salt, a bit of sugar, something that tastes fried, something a bit naughty for when you're hungry and you're… cooked, essentially."

As head chef at the community restaurant Everybody Eats, Johnston is challenged with creating meals from food that would otherwise go to waste.

Tasked with coming up with recipes that are safe to give drunk people, he says he "went nuts" chatting with his wife and friends about meals created after big nights out in their 20s.

Johnston is no longer under the influence when he makes his own favourite late-night meal – and "Achilles heel as a human" – the chugget sandwich (chicken nuggets, iceberg lettuce and mayo).

Stuck at home during the first Covid-19 lockdown, he realised that he'd been using work and alcohol to avoid facing some personal problems.

"Even though I wasn't drinking vast amounts it was how I was drinking ... I noticed the difference in me compared to a lot of people I know, which is most people drink to celebrate and have fun. Whereas me, I used to drink to calm down and forget. There was a point in my life where I was like, 'right, this isn't serving me very well anymore. Yeah, we've had fun and yeah, we've got up to some mischief but now it's the time in my life when I really want to see what I can do if I'm not under the influence. I want to see what I can do as a chef and a person outside of being a chef, how my confidence can grow from not using alcohol as a confidence booster."