Keeley Hawes survives on a diet of bread and toast - because she can't cook

During an appearance on the 'Dish' podcast, she said: "I cannot bear cooking. I absolutely hate it.

"There is a lot of toast in my diet. Cause you can survive on bread, tuna, beans, cheese, taramasalata."

Praising Matthew's culinary skills, she added: "Matthew who really enjoys it. Matthew wakes up in the morning and the first thing out of his mouth will be, 'What should we have for dinner tonight?' At like seven o'clock in the morning. I'm like, 'I don't know. I don't care.' You know, but he will really invest time and really enjoy the process."

Keeley and Matthew's 20-year-old daughter Maggie takes after her father in the kitchen and accepts meal time duties when the 50-year-old actor is away.

She said: "My daughter likes pasta and pesto, but my daughter's also a really good cook. Maggie, she's 20, so she'll often keep me going when Matthew's away. But she's also interested in cooking. As I said, I am not!"

The 49-year-old actress blames her childhood growing up in London in the late 1970s and 1980s and the dawn of convenience food and the addition of the microwave to kitchens in the UK.

She said: "I think that's part of the problem. Because I grew up really in the '80s, I was born in 1976, I grew up during the '80s, and cooking wasn't, it wasn't a thing. The microwave was a big thing, a big sexy new thing in the kitchen. Ready meals. So, it was a bad time really, that formative period, where chicken Kiev balls were all the rage. That's not cooking. There was a lot of grilling of things and tinned things, beans or spaghetti, ping, dinner's ready. So, I think that didn't really help.

"And my mother was not a good cook. On a Sunday, she would make a roast. But she would wake up at sort of nine o'clock, put everything into the oven and onto the hob at the same time and then get it out of the oven and off the hob at one o'clock and that was it. So the greens and everything had all been on since nine o'clock in the morning. And whatever poor little bird had been put in at nine o'clock in the morning.

'Dish from Waitrose' is available on all podcast providers.