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The actor and writer on hotel breakfasts that trigger his ADHD, and why cooking helps him cope with his troubled past and successful presentNick Frost’s new book starts with a recipe for beef stroganoff in his mum’s handwriting that he discovered long after she died. That recollection competes with a memory of his dad’s Sunday lunch, his special way with gravy (involving a can of McEwan’s Export). Also in there is his Welsh auntie’s take on cawl soup, which he now makes for his own three kids; and his trademark “pies in a bowl”, which was a staple of the time he shared a flat with his eternal friend and collaborator Simon Pegg. Though cooking has always been something like therapy for Frost, it was only when a publisher asked him to write a cookbook that he realised that the story of his life was there in the – 300 or so – dishes he could make. Frost’s childhood had been derailed by his father’s bankruptcy and his mother’s alcoholism; the recipes are the good part of his memories of them.The actor, now 51, has covered some of that territory before in his 2015 memoir, Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies, which told of his chaotic life before he made the films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz with Pegg, before they became first cultishly and then Hollywood famous. That book closed with him getting his break on TV in the sitcom Spaced and – characteristically at the time – blowing the nine grand he made on drink and drugs. This one, which takes in fatherhood, his first marriage and his current long-term relationship, provides something of a more reliable happy ending. Continue reading...