Kate Jenkinson certainly knows how to make something out of nothing. The actress was filming the edge-of-your-seat final season of hit Aussie drama Wentworth when COVID shut down the shoot, leaving Kate at her wit’s end.
“I was incredibly bored,” she tells TV WEEK. “I’d just gone from filming 12-hour days and being really busy to not having anything to do in my life.”
What Kate, 44, did next has sent her on an unexpected new career path. At the time, pandemic-driven panic-buying had left supermarket shelves empty.
People were making do with whatever they could find lurking at the back of the pantry. When life hands you lemons – or, in Kate’s case, a bunch of slightly less than fresh vegetables – you make…whatever the heck you want.
“I just thought it would be fun if I filmed myself cooking a meal with the scraps I had lying around the fridge at the time,” Kate recalls.
She even called her online cooking show My Sh*t Kitchen because she felt it was just that. But, lo and behold, the humorous social media videos really caught on.
Now, the success of those videos has led to her debut cookbook, Half Baked: How to Fool the World You Can Cook which bubbles with easy, no-fuss recipes that showcase Kate’s down-to-earth approach to food preparation.
She is, after all, “proudly not a good chef” and says: “I think people need to be reminded that we don’t have to be perfect.”
“I’m a busy working mum who has very little time. I often forget to go grocery shopping. I’m working with a restricted set of skills and time and I feel that I’m like a lot of parents – a lot of mums, especially – in that I’m just working with what I’ve got.”
Her cooking mantra is simple: if it’s edible, it’s good.
But what does Fletcher, Kate’s four-year-old son with partner Nathan Harding, think of Mum’s meals? For the most part, they get the thumbs up. And yet a recent video showed Fletcher’s reluctance to eat a bowl of her coleslaw.
“I think it’s also important to show that you’re not a failure if you serve your kid coleslaw and they end up crying,” she says. “It’s probably pretty relatable.”
One of the recipes in Kate’s book was inspired by a real-life encounter with a fan of her videos. A lady named Bojana approached while Kate was “op-shopping”, telling her how much she loved her videos and giving her a three-ingredient recipe of just flour, milk and cheese. “She said: ‘Go home and make it. It will change your life,’” Kate remembers.
“I thought, there’s no way this is going to be anything special. I went home, turned my camera on and made this cheesy scone recipe – and it was the most delicious thing I have ever eaten! It ended up being my first viral video.”
The recipe was everything Kate loves – easy, accidental and a crowd-pleaser.
While Kate says she now gets just as much public attention for her cooking as she does for her acting roles, a fan recently asked about the upcoming Wentworth spin-off series, announced earlier this year. So, what does she know?
“I can say, I’ve not been approached at this point, so I don’t know whether Allie will make a reappearance,” she says of her character.
“But only time will tell. And it’s very much a testament to how loved that show was that, through sheer willpower and determination, largely from the fan base, it’s getting a new life.”
You can see Kate in season two of Apple TV’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and also in rom-com movie Love, Wine & Valentine, filmed on the Gold Coast with Natalie Bassingthwaighte and Kate’s former Wentworth co-star Bernard Curry.
And, of course, there are the cooking videos. Who knows where they’ll take her next?
“My whole life and career have been me just winging things,” she says.
“It’s worked out pretty well!”
Half Baked
By Kate Jenkinson
Available March 31, RRP $29.99
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