Chapter 11

Armchair Cooking

I don’t like to travel, don’t like flying, don’t like long drives, don’t like hunting for shmancy food in new countries, don’t like the stress or the planning….

Apart from a long list of things I don’t like, the things I do like include trying out new recipes from TV shows and hearing about the interesting food eaten by my friends and family on their travels. It’s a good trade off. They travel, and I get inspiration without needing to get on a plane. There’s peace in the world😇.

Amongst our favourites at PLENTY was the Penang Curry with Basil Fried Rice. Before you ask - nope, I’ve never been to Penang. I learnt about it from an episode of a show called Food Safari. The Basil Rice was my contribution to the recipe. To put our spin on it, instead of putting the vegetables in the curry and serving it, we put the rice and curry in a bowl and placed the veggies on top. Simple, colourful, beautiful, delicious. Never took it off the menu in four years, it was that popular.

How many of you have heard of a Hungarian street food staple called Langos? If you haven’t, google it, but don’t do it when you’re hungary (wink, wink).

I hadn’t heard of it either (nor have I been to Hungary) but it still found its way on to our menu. Simply put, Langos is deep fried dough with an assortment of yummy toppings. My son told me about it when he returned from a trip to Budapest. It’s the street food equivalent of a vada pav there. I knew I had to try it. So after several dubious experiments, he approved my latest version saying it was close enough to the original. And phataak (why should I say voila), Langos made an appearance on the menu. Our trusted tasting panel comprising my husband, our manager Vivek, and our chef said in unison after their first bite, “Oh, bhatura!”

But what a bhatura it was! Imagine a deep fried crisp, thick ‘flatbread’ as it’s called, so crunchy on the outside, soft like a pillow on the inside, served with a ladle-full of sour cream, topped with oodles of grated cheese, garnished with chives! It had absolutely no redeeming quality except that it was amazing.

When my daughter moved to Copenhagen, she would send me pictures of these open-faced sandwiches she would eat all the time. They looked like gorgeous still-life art on bread. That led to a Smorrebrod specials menu that did very well, greatly helped by the fact that each plate just looked so pretty!

I’d bet that none of you had heard of muhammara and hummus in the late 90’s early 2000’s unless you had physically been to Israel or Palestine. I hadn’t. My first exposure to middle-eastern food (and I suspect for a lot of my readers) was when Moshe’s opened in Bombay. He basically started a Hummus revolution! I remember going there once with my niece who lived in New York and she was shocked that hummus existed in India.

For a google-less life at the time, all we could do was hunt through cookbooks for recipes of hummus, baba ganoush and muhammara. Kabuli Chana suddenly became the order of the day. Eggplant became the ‘it’ vegetable (move over baigan bhartha). Since red capsicum was hard to come by, muhammara took a back seat in our kitchens. Yes, kids, there was a time we would clamour to buy red and yellow capsicum from the bhajiwala when he had some in stock. ‘Twas a different time.

Tarla Dalal had all of us yearning to cook and eat lasagna and white sauce pasta without going to Italy, tacos without going to Mexico, schezwan noodles without going to China. What would we even know about nachos and cheese sauce but for her and New Yorker?

My dear friend Nisha, who enjoys travelling around the world and is my eyes and ears for new food, returned from the States and told me about this ‘amazing’ place called Chipotle where you could pick and choose fresh ingredients and make your own bowl of beans, rice, veggies, salsa etc. Thus was born the infamous and extremely popular Burrito Bowl at my café Food for Thought. The office crowd and lawyers that came to us loved it because it was hearty, healthy, filling - all the things they looked for in a meal.

My Strawberry Tart with crème anglaise was born out of watching Jacques Pepin cooking shows on TV where the idea of ‘ze custard’ being made from ‘ze eggs’ was just so far in the realm of fantasy that I had to try it for myself just to see if he was lying about it. When I actually managed to make it successfully, I had new respect for the technical chops of mon ami Jacques. There was no looking back. Today, my strawberry tart orders take centre stage over any other dessert when strawberries are in season. 

Amongst my most popular cooking classes are the Pan-Asian Cuisines. Bindaetteok, Japchae, Sundubu Jjigae, Bibimbap. I’ve never been to Korea. But I know how to Google. Buy Gochujang and Gochugaru. Make Korean food. Teach a Korean class. (Side note - never seen a Korean show, don’t intend to).

Okonomiyaki, Katsu Curry, Sushi. Never been to Japan. Buy kombu, pickled ginger, nori, wasabi. Make Japanese food. Teach a Japanese class.

Triple Chicken Schezwan, Wanton Soup, Chilli Chicken. Eaten at Hungry Eyes Truck, Nariman Point and the Mafco stall at Napean Sea Road. Make Chinese food. Teach a ‘Retro Chinese’ class.

Kumpir, Tagine…watched Anthony Bourdain. You get my drift.

So, a little bit about my style of cooking. I will read a recipe, research many versions of it, try the way the original is supposed to taste and then try it again to make it taste the way I think my family would like it. They will eat it and then point out the things they didn’t like. Mean? Nope, just honest (I think). That’s the way I know exactly how to tweak a recipe to perfection.

And that’s what I do with all the dishes I learn from my armchair. The rice in the Burrito Bowl got an upgrade. The beans mixture was a delicious spiced gravy instead of just boiled beans mixed together. The veggies mix became a combo of corn and paneer tossed in a spice mix. Bland is not for us Indians, right? In the Sundubu Jigae (Korean stew with tofu) the gochugaru made friends with kashmiri chilli powder to give the stew an upgrade. The Penang Curry was uplifted with oodles of basil in the rice to give it my own spin.

A customer once remarked that he had been to Penang and our penang curry was not ‘authentic’.

Does it really matter whether we have travelled and eaten around the world? Whether we ‘know’ our Malbec from our Barolo (my fav is Sula Dindori) or our single malts from our blends (my fav is Royal Challenge). Somebody somewhere is ‘travelling’ through the food that they are eating, be it in a restaurant in their neighbourhood or at a restaurant somewhere abroad. The influence of internet and social media has made the world a much smaller place. No one stopped eating good food when the world stopped still for 2 years. And we are not about to do that now.

“No one is born a great cook, one learns by doing” - Julia Child