Singer Kelis cooks up a storm with new book

So we know you can carry a tune, but can you cook? In the case of American singer-songwriter and Grammy nominee Kelis, the answer is a resounding yes.

As well as having a stellar music career, selling more than six million records, the musician is a Cordon Bleu trained chef, and has worked in professional kitchens. She also has her own line of sauces, Bounty & Full, and a food truck that she occasionally cooks in at music festivals in the US.

Her love of food and cooking goes right back to her childhood, when she watched her mother run a catering business out of her home in Harlem. Following in her musician father’s footsteps, she signed a recording contract at 17, a move that steered Kelis away from a culinary career. But the interest never left her. The global travelling that came with her music career proved to be a source of inspiration for her cooking.

“As much as my music is who I am, so is my cooking. Food has become such a way of life, sort of like what you listen to, who you’re with, what you’re wearing. My character comes through in my cooking,” she says.

It was 10 years into her successful globetrotting music career that Kelis stopped, and took a breather, and went to culinary school in California, where she was living. “This was one of the best things I would ever do,” she says.

Going back on tour afterwards, the axis had changed. “I started taking gigs in cities that made no sense career-wise for my music; but because it was my little secret. I was basically going on a food tour from country to country.”

She called her latest album Food, and it's just been joined by her first cookbook, My Life on a Plate: Recipes From Around the World (Kyle Books, £19.99). It's a very personal selection of recipes which she says "is moulded by her culture, her travels and all the people she met along the way". Puerto Rican family favourites such as pernil (pork shoulder), sit easily alongside Swedish meatballs and Malay chicken curry.

Unlike some less well-advised celebrity cookbooks: Orange Is the New Black Presents: The Cookbook – prison nosh, no thanks – and the risible In the Kitchen with Kris: A Kollection of Kardashian-Jenner Family Favorites – just, why? – Kelis's book is worth having on your shelf.