The kitchen is her happy place! New mom Cameron Diaz shared that she loves to cook and his currently making up to three meals a day while quarantined amid the coronavirus pandemic with her husband Benji Madden and their 3-month-old daughter, Raddix.
“My favorite thing in the world to do is cook … that’s my happy place,” the actress, 47, said during a Wednesday, April 22, Instagram Live video with makeup artist Gucci Westman. “Cooking is everything.”
Diaz shared that whipping up dishes in the kitchen and having a glass of wine at the end of the day are helping her “make it through” the current health crisis. “I want to cook,” she said. “I just cook every day, like it doesn’t matter, like I cook at least one meal, sometimes two, sometimes three. It’s just what I do.”
She continued: “[Cooking] is my wind down. Every night I cook. Dinner takes me like an hour, but I want it to. It’s my time to, like, chill out.”
The California native, who said she’s been preparing meals since she was a child, noted that she’s particularly fond of the social aspect of cooking. “I love sitting in the kitchen with my friends and everybody’s just sitting in front of me,” she explained.
The Bad Teacher star then added that she even designed her kitchen to be a space where people socialize and spend time together. “I made my kitchen, like, half of my house and everybody sits in front of me and I sit on the other side and we just talk,” she explained. “[Cooking] is not stressful for me because I’m just going through the motions of it and thinking about like, ‘What’s the best? What’s going to taste the best? What should I add now? What’s the next layer of flavor?’”
“It’s all about layering the flavor,” Diaz added with a laugh. “They do call it the culinary arts, you know?”
As for what she’s currently enjoying, the Body Book author admitted it’s all about the carbs. “Girl, I am eating way too much pasta,” she told Westman, 48. “I’m eating [pasta] like, every night … I was just on a pasta diet. I was like, ‘What should we have tonight, darling? Should we have more pasta?’”
Diaz noted that she’s currently craving the Italian staple because it’s “comforting” and versatile. “That’s the beautiful thing, like with pasta or rice, I’m always throwing whatever we had the night before or new veggies and everything and just chopping it all up and cooking it together. It’s so good.”
When her Whole Foods delivery arrived in the middle of the chat, The Holiday star explained that she’s also being extra careful about not wasting any precious eats. “I have a whole system with my food and I’m just the person who wants to make sure I use everything anyhow. I don’t like to waste food. I think it’s so disrespectful to waste food,” she said. “I cannot throw away one bite of food. Then I compost everything that I don’t use and then if I can’t compost it in my own comp composter, I put it into the the green bin for the city.”
Aside from cooking up a storm, Diaz and Madden, 41 have their hands full with their little girl. The Longevity Book author and the former Good Charlotte frontman announced the arrival of their daughter in January. Us Weekly later confirmed that they welcomed her via surrogate.
During her chat with Westman, Diaz noted that the fact that she and her husband have very different sleep schedules has been helpful in adjusting to life with a newborn. “I go to bed early and wake up early, and he wants to go to bed late and wake up later,” she explained. “That works so well for us as parents. I can go to bed a few hours earlier and he does those later feeds. Then I can go to bed and I wake up early and am with [our daughter] early in the morning so he can sleep.”
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