It was whilst lying in the bath that Amanda Stretton had her brainwave.
"I just kept thinking, this is dreadful - there must be some way that something can be done to support these guys"
The guys in question are chefs, and while many businesses have been affected by the lockdown brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, the hospitality industry has been hit harder than most. "When everyone else was first processing what lockdown was going to mean, the government guidelines for restaurants were very grey and foggy" she says. "Whereas other businesses had had some guidance, the hospitality industry hadn't. Chefs were up in arms saying 'what are we supposed to do? Our business has just died overnight'".
Amanda's idea was a simple one - if people couldn't get to a restaurant, then the restaurant could come to them, but with a little bit of legwork on the part of the customer - they'd have to cook the meal themselves. On the face of it, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun, but when the person giving you a step-by-step tutorial on how to prepare the dish is a Michelin 2* chef, then suddenly it gets interesting.
As a keen and accomplished home cook herself, there was perhaps another less altruistic reason behind her initial idea. "I am not used to cooking 14 meals a week for my family, and so I was bored by my cooking and fed up with having to be imaginative. My normal repertoire which would usually last a fortnightly cycle before dishes were repeated, was now being exhausted almost on a weekly basis and I just thought, I need more inspiration for stuff I can cook at home that really excites everybody".
Despite the internet becoming saturated with cooking content very quickly during those early days of lockdown, as chefs and food writers scrambled to impart helpful recipes using store cupboard ingredients, Amanda just wasn't inspired by what she found.
"A lot of them I found to be...disappointing is the wrong word, but they just weren't challenging enough. I didn't need to be told how to make things I already knew, I wanted to be inspired and challenged, and I wanted to learn something new and really bridge the gap between cooking at home and eating out".
Through her ongoing relationship and work with Michelin, Amanda knew many chefs and she reached out to a few of them and told them about the idea, persuasively arguing that it would be a way of keeping the restaurants - particularly the destination ones without enough of a surrounding catchment area to sustain them - connected to their customers, and 'Stay Home, Eat Out' was born.
"We did one or two, and then more people came out of the woodwork and said 'We'd love to have a go - can we come? Can we do it?' And so it grew and grew, to the point where we were having three chefs a week".
The chefs are responsible for choosing one of their recipes that people can cook at home, using ingredients that importantly are easy to get hold of. "That was a key factor" says Amanda, "because of course particularly at the beginning of lockdown, there were shortages of just about everything".
The chef then hosts a cook-along on the Stay Home Eat Out Instagram feed, demonstrating step-by-step how to make their chosen dish, and the result is a Michelin restaurant worthy meal cooked by you and enjoyed in the comfort of your own home. Unfortunately you still have to do the washing up.
An unexpected benefit of these cook-alongs, has been the chance for the chefs to support their excellent suppliers who, with the restaurants closed suddenly have nobody buying their produce. "These guys have a huge amount of money tied up in their stock" Amanda explains "Particularly with something like dry aged meat - it has to go through a long process before it can be sold. Suddenly they're ready to sell it and they've got nobody to sell it to, so by doing some promotions together it becomes a way for the restaurant to keep that supply chain nourished to the best of their abilities throughout lockdown".
The feedback has been incredibly positive from both chefs and the home cooks following along alike.
"Everybody has loved it" Amanda says, "We haven't had a single negative comment, and the restaurants have been so supportive. We made a decision early on to keep the level at the top end of hospitality with the Michelin starred chefs, head chefs from Michelin starred restaurants or chefs who have been in Michelin restaurants and who are now maybe doing something slightly different".
Amanda's involvement with Michelin began in 2013 when in her more familiar guise of motor sports presenter, she was working at the Goodwood Festival of Speed and Michelin needed someone to host chef demonstrations on their stand. "They said to me 'are you ok to do this?' and I literally bit their arm off" she laughs. "Then in 2018 Michelin decided that they wanted to make more of an event of their star revelations (when restaurants are awarded the much coveted Michelin stars) as they hadn't been doing much of a performance around it, so they asked if I'd be keen to do it to which of course I said absolutely!"
Over the years Amanda has developed strong relationships with many of the chefs and restaurants, and she's clearly concerned about how things might look for the hospitality industry once lockdown is completely lifted and restaurants and cafés can open again to paying customers.
"I've spent hours talking to chefs over the last couple of months about what it's going to look like afterwards, and they are all very scared" she says. "Whatever the government decide the social distancing rule has to be, it is going to affect the number of covers restaurants can have. If you then start looking at reducing covers by 50% if the rule is 2 metres, or say 25% if it's 1 metre, then that will mean reduced output from the kitchen, which means less turnover, less profit and ultimately that's going to mean job losses"
Whilst there would never be a good time for a crisis on this scale to hit the industry, Amanda believes that it's a particularly devastating blow now.
"The UK food industry has really stepped up over the last 15, 20 years" she says. "It is...was on a roll - we have some amazing chefs doing innovative and challenging food - it would be such a shame if this does impact that trajectory and has a lasting effect, and I suspect it will".
It's clear that in the future chefs and restaurants will need to be innovative if they're going to survive in a post lockdown world, and some are already rising to the challenge. Amanda describes one such scheme currently being trialled whereby in a central kitchen, cooks recreate dishes given to them by Michelin chefs to their exact specifications and it's then delivered by special mopeds with gyroscopic boxes at the back to keep everything straight and level. "It means that a family of four can all order different dishes from different chefs, but it's prepared in the same kitchen" she explains. " Your delivery rider comes in a shirt and tie and delivers this incredible food, so it's as close to a restaurant experience as you can get but in your home. That can easily work after lockdown and I think we're going to see more of that type of thing".
Despite the obvious threat to the hospitality industry when life returns to some sort of normality, Amanda believes that some positives will emerge from this unprecedented time.
"I think that the idea of food provenance will be high on people's agendas" she says. " When we started to see the food shortages in the supermarkets, people started realising how broken that food chain system was and so I think it has made a lot of people think about where food comes from and sustainability - I'd like to think that's going to carry on when life does get back to normal, even if it's just a small improvement".
It's something that she herself is much more conscious of and has turned to growing her own vegetables for the first time this year, digging up part of her lawn to make space. " My veg has gone bananas!" she laughs. "Beginner's luck? I don't know, but my lettuces are beautiful!"
"I've learned so much through this" she says, "I have also spent a fortune on new kitchen kit, because you realise quite quickly that your non-stick frying pans aren't really all that non-stick anymore!"
There are definite similarities between the two professions that she works closely with Amanda believes. "A chef who is driven to the extent that these guys are for perfection, obsessing over every detail, the quality of the ingredients...that's very much the same as an F1 or FE driver when they're talking about the team, or the work they have to do to get to that level".
So what will Amanda take away from the 'Stay Home, Eat Out' initiative when life returns to normal? "The nice thing is that I have learned little things that are now part of my repertoire" she says. "There was one recipe that had cauliflower purée, and I have now made that purée lots of times and we have had it with loads of different dishes. For the Raby Hunt chicken pie which was our first featured recipe (pictured), I had never made puff pastry before but the satisfaction of making it from scratch and seeing all of my beautiful layers...it was blindingly good"
And the future of 'Stay Home, Eat Out' beyond lockdown? "The plan is to carry it on as an online cookery school so I've got lots of chefs busy writing up notes" Amanda says. "It's something they can do on days when they're not doing service, so a way of earning without impacting on their business". She wraps up with a smile at the thought of what's to come "We've got some good ones coming up too...real crowd pleasers".