- I'm Padma Lakshmi and this
is everything I eat in a day. So somewhere around six
or 6:30 I usually have my first cup of tea. It's a masala chai called
Buckery tea and then I have that with whole milk and honey. 10 to 15 minutes later I will
have my second cup of tea, same tea, usually with a
big bowl of vanilla yogurt with cinnamon and sliced
banana or a big bowl of blackberries and cottage
cheese or toast with avocado and slices of cheese or
sometimes I will start out with the fruit and cottage
cheese or yogurt and fruit combo and then an hour later I will
have something that's savory, like an egg in a hole which
is basically a big slice of sour dough bread fried
in a pan with a circle cut out of it and then an egg cracked into it and then you have to shake
your pan so all the bread gets covered with the white
and then you have to gently take the spatula and flip it
so you don't break the yolk and I like for the egg white to get really lacy and crispy. So all the white has to
be cooked but the yolk has to be at least jammy if not runny and jammy in the center. I take that and I put it on
a plate and then I drizzle that with a little bit more raw olive oil and then I use sea salt from
Cyprus or Maldon flake salt because you want something gritty. I have a lot of salts. I have like 45 different kinds of salts I like a real gravelly,
nuggety black pepper grind so that when you bite
into a little shard of it you are really getting that pepper heat. And then on top of that I've put something called Maggi Hot and Sweet and it's like, if Ketchup and Tabasco had
a baby and then I just kind of Jackson Pollock that
all over the toast. If it doesn't make a lot
of noise when I try to make that first cut with the
knife, I didn't do it right. And then, that's my
part two of my breakfast with the third cup of tea. Then if I'm working, if I'm
filming either "Top Chef" or "Taste the Nation"
then I will go into glam and as I'm getting my
hair and make up done, I have my fourth cup of tea. When I get to set I usually
have my fifth cup of tea. (mellow music) So let's say I'm on "Top Chef". I really try not to eat too
much, in spite of everything I just said because I want
to give the contestants the full audience of my appetite. Especially in the first
half of the season, I have to sometimes try 19
dishes in that quickfire alone and I will sometimes have
to take one bite or two. So depending on the challenge
it could be anything from Mexican food to doughnuts to ceviche and so I usually try and
take one or two bites, I try and chew slowly so I
don't have to take a third bite and I get the full mouth-feel
experience of whatever they're giving me and then
I get off work and I usually do a quick lap around
Krafty and I usually make this funky drink to
clean out all that stuff. And that drink is four ounces
of green tea with honey, three ounces of raw
unsweetened cranberry juice, one vitamin C packet and
one big heaping scoop of fiber powder and then I mix that all up and depending on how fast I can drink it from when it's made it
will either still be liquid or literally turn into a
sludge because the fiber will expand so it's
important to drink that fast. It's not very pleasant,
and so this is not a treat, this is medicine for my
body because I've had to eat whatever food, funky food
that I've had to eat. When you're eating that much food, your system expects more
food and so then I'll usually have either a peanut
butter and jelly sandwich or I'll have an open faced grilled cheese which is called the chili cheese toast, which is basically like
a green chili paste or some hot sauce if we don't
have fresh minced chilies that we can kind of jam into
some olive oil, salt and lemon. And then we put cheese on
top of that and then we put it in the toaster oven because
I hate microwaving cheese, don't do it, it's horrible,
sorry Michelle Obama. If I feel like I should
be virtuous then I usually just eat a Granny Smith
apple sliced with a cup of peanut butter and I
don't like that oily, separated, good-for-you peanut butter, I want like the industrial Skippy or Jif and then after that we usually go back for judges' table or we go back
to do the interview portion. I find it's often easier
to interview somebody over a cup of tea with some biscuits
or some chips and salsa or some shots of tequila,
it just loosens everyone up. Every interview is like a first date, it's hard for me to
have food in front of me and not nibble on it, so
I try to make it healthy. What does that mean? That means cashews or dried apricots, but sometimes we do have a weakness for Vick's jalapeno potato chips. My crew keeps getting a
kick out of seeing me eat Flaming Hot Cheetos. I'm not sure why, but they're
fine, they're not great. Then I go home and I
have another cup of tea. And I usually had another
cup of tea on either side of that interview portion
and if it's judges' table then I've usually had a cup
of tea for every contestant that we call up there. And then there's a point at
which if judges' table takes too long I switch from tea
to a glass of champagne or wine from one of our sponsors. It doesn't count if it's a sponsor. And then I usually go
home and when I'm home I don't wanna eat any of
that fancy, over-seasoned goofy food, so for dinner
I just eat a simple bowl of steamed Basmati rice
with dal or yellow lentils made with lots of ginger and
cumin that's been tempered and fried in a pan with dried red chilies and fresh green chilies,
that'll be my dinner and I'll usually have a
cup of tea before dinner and then after dinner I'll
have my last cup of tea so I think we're at like
12 now, tea, right, yeah. And then, if my daughter's
up then we have nacho night. We usually use two or three
different kinds of cheese, we use a mild cheddar
and then a pepper jack and then we take pickled
jalapenos, not raw, and we sprinkle those on and
then we usually chop tomatoes and make guacamole and we
always keep little containers of black beans that we've
boiled, and then depending on how hungry we are, we
either put them in the oven or if we're really jonesing
and it's one o'clock in the morning, we are
night owls in my house, I'll just stick it in the microwave. I didn't talk about dessert
so much because I'm not really a sweet eater, but I do like a good hunk
of dark, dark chocolate. There's this chocolate that
has cloves, and cayenne and crystallized ginger so
my only real sweet treat on a regular basis I mean,
will be just like a half a bar of chocolate. Usually around the corner
from wherever my daughter is sitting so she doesn't see. And so, that's pretty
much what I eat on a day. (upbeat music)
“It doesn’t count if it’s a sponsor”
I feel like champagne Padma might be a more common occurrence than we knew 😂
This is maybe the only celebrity’s eating habit I can get behind. It’s relatively real food and not “I eat 3 grains of rice with a piece of lettuce on the side”
I’ve always wondered this. Hmm. That’s a lot of tea.
I was anticipating to roll my eyes at this but I was unexpectedly charmed. As an aside, Padma really is one of the most beautiful women in the world.
If you want to cringe watch Kelly Ripa’s food diary 😬
I like that she eats real food! And I really find her “medicine” concoction of the tea and cranberry juice and vitamin C and fiber interesting, I’m going to try that after I eat a crap ton of food.
Hard to get hungry if you drink 12 cups of tea. Personally I'd love judging top chef because I love the idea of bites of many different foods.
That dark chocolate with cloves, cayenne, and ginger sounds amazing! Does anyone know who makes this? Google failed me on this.
I don't stan Padma at all but I really enjoyed that.