French chefs cook up antidote to virus confinement

Frustrated at stay-at-home confinement, France's celebrity chefs are cooking up an antidote to the gloomy days of pandemic and quarantine with the help of television and social networks.

"Today it's not chef Lignac talking, it's Cyril who like all French people has to do his shopping near where he lives," says Cyril Lignac, the nation's current gastronomic media star.

On prime-time television, he sports a T-shirt to prepare dinner from his home on his new show "Everyone in the Kitchen".

The show focuses on everyday cooking and the travails of the public in a time of national emergency. The coronavirus crisis has enabled chefs "to play a different tune in the kitchen", he tells AFP. "It's very interesting to improve people's daily lives by cooking just from the cupboard and the fridge."
Other chefs are following a similar path. "There are no tricks," says Paris chef Amandine Chaignot during an online class explaining how to prepare asparagus. "I have a tiny kitchen, if I can do it, you can too."
"You can miss so much if you tell yourself 'I don't know how to do the simplest of things,'" she tells AFP. "It has to be easy, quick and not involve a lot of equipment or ingredients you cannot source."