Ella Mills: ‘When everyone is so overwhelmed and so busy, it’s got to be easy’

Barely have time to moan about how little time you have? You know you really are short on it. Amidst the manic work deadlines, school pick-up, the big shop and keeping the dog alive, it’s easy to forget to feed yourself. Well, properly, at least.

So if you’ve eaten too many fish finger sandwiches, ready meals and packets of crisps stood at the kitchen counter, and wish you had the wherewithal to actually cook something good for you, now might be the moment.

Thankfully, you don’t have to do it alone. Ella Mills, aka Deliciously Ella, has a new cookbook out, Quick Wins: Healthy Cooking For Busy Lives, written to make mealtimes swifter, easier and more nutritious. “I’d never been someone who’d mapped out what I was going to cook for the week, but then suddenly, you get home and it’s like, ‘What’s for dinner?’ and it’s like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t have the headspace to figure out what’s for dinner’,” she says, remembering a couple of years ago when her business was crazy busy and she’d get home and have herself, her husband Matthew Mills (son of the late politician Tessa Jowell) and their daughters, Skye and May, to feed, and they were all getting sick of the same meals on rotation. “I really found myself in that pattern, and it’s not that you don’t have 20 minutes to make stuff – I did have 20 minutes – but your mental load is so high that by the time it’s 7.30pm, you’re just like, ‘Toast!’”

The Rugby-born food entrepreneur’s answer was to start “gently mapping” out dinner ideas for the week ahead and doing some Sunday batch cooking. “Life was just suddenly so much easier. It was just one thing I didn’t need to worry about. I found we were eating so much more variety. There was just an ease in getting home being like, ‘Right, tonight, we’re making fancy beans, and I have the ingredients. I know what I’m going to do. It’s going to take me 15 minutes’,” she says. “Or, ‘We’re going to do a tray bake with rice and tofu, fajita style, with garlic yogurt’. Everything goes on the tray, it goes in the pan, pop it together, we’re winning.”

The book is not a rigid meal planner though, instead it’s a rough framework to help you answer the “annoying, age-old question of, ‘What’s for dinner?’” in a way that gives you variety, flexibility, and frees up precious brain space. Expect one-pan dinners, store-cupboard meals that just require picking one fresh ingredient up on the way home from work, and dishes you can batch cook, freeze and transform into something new (“Like stews into chunky soups”). “I don’t want lots of washing up. I don’t want lots of chaos on a Tuesday night after school clubs, after pick up, I just want something quite seamless, that’s delicious, nutritious and quite easy to do,” says Mills, 34.

Mills began writing recipes in 2012 in an effort to improve her health after struggling with chronic health issues that left her fatigued, in pain and with digestive issues. Her Deliciously Ella blog became a pioneer of the plant-based ‘clean eating’ movement, which has since received backlash for being highly restrictive, obsessive and for contributing to disordered eating. Looking back – Mills has written numerous cookbooks, hosts The Wellness Scoop podcast and is probably the reason you have a spiralizer sitting at the back of your kitchen cupboard – she says it’s “extraordinary” how the food landscape has changed since her debut cookbook in 2015.

“I was here saying we need to eat more real food, more whole foods, more plants. We shouldn’t eat so many additives and preservatives. And people were like, ‘Stop telling me what to do, it’s so frustrating!’ And I understand there was an element of a young woman telling people that, it was maybe a little frustrating, but I am really excited how much the world has changed,” she says, nodding to how much more aware we are of what we put in our bodies.

However, “50% of calories come from ultra processed foods, up to 80% for one in five people, yet only one in five people manage to get their five a day,” she says, warning we still have a long way to go. “In Britain, we’re eating fewer vegetables than at any time in the last 50 years. But then likewise, we have a multi-trillion dollar wellness industry, yet our health is getting worse.”

“We’re at this tipping point where we’ve got to move wellness away from powders and gadgets and gizmos, and expensive, complicated things, back into, ‘What are the little wins I can have in my day-to-day life?’ We need to not be terrified of one bite of ultra processed food, but empowered to be like, ‘I do need to reduce that, and I do need to eat more plants,’” she muses.

She’s all for starting small, not totally overhauling your entire diet. Grab a bag of mixed seeds and nuts from Tesco and sprinkle it on your porridge or salad or soup. “The goal is to get to about 30 plants a week. But if the goal this week is to just increase it by three or four, that’s so much better than trying to change everything,” she recommends. “With the noise and overwhelm of people’s lives, coupled with the food landscape we live in, where the vast majority of what’s sold is UPFs, it’s really, really difficult. Therefore, moving 1% closer to your goal every day will get you miles closer to where you want to be.”

For the majority of people “it’s not about good willpower or bad willpower. It’s just that life is too busy”. “If you’ve had a bad night’s sleep, you’re proven to crave sugar. Life will happen,” she says. “Have gentle foundations that can ebb and flow, as opposed to crazy diet commitments where you’re on a bandwagon or off it.” That way, you might find a balance that works for you.

Quick Wins: Healthy Cooking For Busy Lives by Ella Mills is published by Yellow Kite, priced £25. Author photography: Sophia Spring. Food photography: Clare Winfield. Available now.