I have been lucky enough to have lived all over the world from New Delhi to Sydney to Dubai to London, to New York, to Paris and now back in London again with plenty of travel in between! This means I have enjoyed a lot of amazing food around the world! I love eating and spending time in the kitchen cooking up something great!
As a kid I would pretend to be a tv chef cooking as I messed around in the kitchen fixing myself a snack, I remember putting on my French accent for my running commentary! I properly started learning to cook after I got married and moved away from Sydney to Dubai and mjorly missed my mum’s food. I would call her long distance (which in those days was not free!) and ask her how she makes matar paneer, rajma or her chicken curry and started jotting down the recipes and trying them out till they tasted just like hers! I also expanded my knowledge of other cuisines by getting a lot of good cookbooks and teaching myself how to cook my favourite dishes. Ken Hom was instrumental in my Chinese cooking education!
My favourite pastime still is to lose myself for hours in books about food and feel like I traveled off to a distant land in some way and get inspiration for my next meals. I am constantly planning what to eat next, and hate to waste an opportunity to make each meal delicious and joyful.
Good food for me does more than nourish the body, it makes me happy and feeds the soul. I love spending time in the kitchen, coming up with interesting menus and travelling to distant lands through cooking without spending even an hour actually travelling! I love how you can be in India for lunch and then have a gorgeous French dinner. Pretty exciting stuff!
Though I try to eat more plant based food, I love meat too much to ever be a vegetarian. I find I love vegetarian meals and do not miss meat when I eat them. Coming from an Indian background I guess we have such great vegetarian recipes that I never really thought of a meal as being incomplete without meat. As such I am always on the lookout for wholesome filling and delicious vegetarian recipes that can stand up as a full meal to any meat eater in their own right.
On this blog you may see me cook from a lot of different cuisines. Growing up in Australia, it’s as multicultural as you can get, so we ate lots of Italian, Greek, and Asian food, naturally I cook tons this type of food. I also find Asian food extremely healthy and nutritious apart from delicious! A quick Chinese or Thai stir fry is full of flavour and also pretty healthy. The Indian recipes on this blog are truly authentic and a lot will be exactly how my Mom makes them! I got my love of cooking from her and not surprisingly it is some of her dishes I crave most when I need comfort. The smells alone take me back in time to my childhood. I try to stay as true as I can to the original flavours from a cuisine when cooking.
My time in New York opened my mind to the wonders of Mexican food, some real BBQ food from the southern sates, I made it my mission to learn how to make the best ribs and succeeded! That whole tangent has not led to the acquisition of a big green egg and Pitmaster cooking status awaits… so you shall be seeing lots of bbq recipes as I get deeper into that journey!
Having lived in Paris for four years, I have come to appreciate the refined cuisine and actually find a lot of joy in making the food of this great land. My favourite dishes are usually quite simple with great ingredients and beautiful flavour. The French way of life of going to the market at the end of your street, having a chat with all the stall you visit, getting their instructions how to cook what you bought is very dear to my heart. It is a time of my life I will cherish always and some habits and way of doing things that I picked up there I will thankfully have for the rest of my life.
Well, with all that said hope you enjoy reading the blog and get down in the kitchen and get cooking with me…
