[img:$uid]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx218/MMikeyBee/Kelis-in-the-kitchen-006.jpg[/img:$uid]

I'm a really emotional cook. Not violent, but I don't like someone coming in while I'm cooking. I'm notorious for themed dinner parties. The colour green, The Sopranos' last episode… any excuse. But if anyone arrives before I'm ready and walks through for a chat, I'm like: "Just stand back. Stay there! In fact, just go – this is not for you."

The album Kelis Was Here sucked the life out of me and so I went off and studied to be a cordon bleu chef. What's great about food is that it's less about who you know and what you look like, and more about if you're any good.

At the launch party for Flesh Tone I was judged on the album and my cooking. I prepared all the food – duck confit salad, coconut lobster soup, fried red snapper, ribeye, mango mousse en toile, chocolatey Grand Marnier bread pudding. Getting it wrong is not an option.

If I ate half a peanut now my throat would close up, my face would cover with welts and I'd have to take an adrenalin shot then rush to A&E. I can smell a peanut across a room. The problem's when it's masked by hot spices. I ate in an Indian restaurant in Switzerland and afterwards I turned around and the passengers in my car screamed: "Oh my god – your face!"

As a child I'd help my mum cook and it was ridiculous – she had the correct gadget or utensil for everything. "Stop! Don't use that, I have exactly the right utensil." After I left home I survived on cup-a-meals and never saw myself as being like her. Now I've become her. In LA I have a kitchen full of kitchenware, and closets full and they're in other rooms, too. My favourites are zesters, pasta makers, piping bags and wire cake brushes.

I have texture issues. I don't like anything strangely chewy. The taste of oyster is actually great, but to feel an oyster, or a clam, in my mouth – no, no, no, it's too weird.

My milkshakes? I wasn't sure how I'd feel about breastfeeding, but quickly realised its brilliance.

I eat cold food in studios – it doesn't make me sleepy. Eating warm soothes me too much. I eat ginger, religiously, as a natural lozenge for my vocal cords. When I finish a stage performance, a glass of red wine's first, then I'm ravenously hungry. The problem's doing a 3am club performance. Eating late gives me reflux.

Salmonella poisoning is the worst sickness, ever. I turned green, literally. My body was so poisoned they thought my appendix had exploded.

My father was a strict vegetarian. I guess he wanted me to be too, but my grandmother gave me a chicken doner and it was all over – I became a meat-eater, full-on. Zero guilt. My last supper would be a charcuterie smorgasbord with every kind of meat, and sauces to dip them in. When I get through this album's cycle I want to develop a Kelis sauce range. I'm a saucy saucier.

Flesh Tone is out now on Polydor