FORTUNE COOKIE: Recipes for a Multitasking Generation

This column first appeared in the Mail Today dated January 30, 2014. If you wish to see the original page, click on http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=3012014 and go to Page 15. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

A NEW generation of cookbook writers are rewriting the ground rules of the craft. It may be because of the criticism that their recipes are meant to be admired for the pictures that accompany them because they are impossible to follow. Elaborate recipe requiring numerous ingredients and many stages of cooking may demonstrate the prowess of the person writing them,  but these are impossible to replicate at home, and can be frustrating for both the homemaker and the hobby cook.

It is heart-warming therefore to see the efflorescence of cookbooks that the Regular Ritu or the Neighbourhood Neha can relate to even as she juggles the multiple chores of managing a career, running a home and raising children, who can never be satisfied with the food they get. Cookbooks must address the needs of our multi-tasking, multi-cultural urban middle-class universe, where each family wakes up every morning with one existential question: What shall we eat today that will be different from what we had yesterday?

The debut cookbooks of Kunal

Kapur (above) and Rushina

Munshaw Ghildiyal address

the needs of a time-challenged,

 multi-tasking homemaker

 and hobby cook

We have two of them that have just been published and stand out in the crowd. A Pinch of This, A Handful of That (Westland; Rs 595) is by a popular food blogger (A Perfect Bite), Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, who lives the life of the average working mother making a desperate daily effort to prevent her children from seeking out junk food as deliverance from 'uninteresting' food at home. I first met her at a Godrej Nature's Basket cookery demo and was impressed by the turnout -- there's clearly an audience of young mothers out there among whom Rushina is the new domestic goddess.

The other cookbook (A Chef in Every Home; Random House) is by the sunny-faced Kunal Kapur from MasterChef India, a good-looking Punjabi munda whom every auntieji following the reality show co-hosted by him would want to have as her son-in-law. Away from his popular television persona, Kunal is an inventive chef who works very hard in the kitchens of The Leela Gurgaon and I first discovered him through his paan-flavoured panna cotta at the hotel's under-rated Indian restaurant, Diya, whose kitchen is now headed by an acolyte of the Michelin-starred Atul Kochhar.

In his acknowledgements, Kapur mentions an array of male relatives, unintentionally pointing to a rising constituency for cookbooks -- the urban male hobby cook, whom you'll find all over Facebook and Twitter, exchanging their recipes and holding forth on those of others on Sikandalous Cuisine, the busiest and the largest (at least in South Asia) recipe-sharing social media community. The audience for cookbooks clearly has transformed dramatically since the glory days of Mrs Balbir Singh and two Mrs Dalals -- Tarla and Katy.

The beauty of Rushina's book is that like the average day of a homemaker, it follows no order. Each page, as a result, throws up a little surprise, or an interesting anecdote, and you can start reading the book from anywhere and still find a recipe you'd want to replicate at home. You could find a recipe for something as easy as Keema Pasta or as challenging as the 13 Onion Pasta, or as nostalgia-laden as the chicken curry that is served with roomali roti at Mayo College on Tuesdays, or as exotic as the Root Spinach Soup of Istanbul's Asitane restaurant, or the South African Bunny Chow, or Pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup, or the Channa Bateta of Bhendi Bazar's Bohri Mohalla. There's something for every inclination.

Kunal's book, as you'd expect from a chef, is structured like a traditional cookbook, but its sweep is remarkable -- from Menaskai, the famous spicy pineapple curry from coastal Karnataka, Bhutte ka Shorba with Chilli Butter Popcorn and Potli Masala Creme Brulee, to Mutton Varuval, Fish Amritsari, Prawns Moilee and Char Siu Mutton Chops, the recipes come with a twist to excite your imagination. And perhaps prevent your little ones from ordering in a McDonald's lunch or Domino's dinner.

LOVE YOUR BREAKFAST? INSTAGRAM IT!

WHAT do Instagram, India Art Fair, signature breakfasts and tea-time eclairs have in common? I asked myself this question as I watched Arnaud Champenois of Starwood Hotels and Resorts walk in, his fluorescent green shoelaces grabbing my attention before anything else. We were at Le Meridien, at an exhibition of Instagram pictures of Delhi's sights and people by Dan Rubin, who with 600,000-plus followers on the picture blogging site is a social media hero. The three-city show (San Francisco and Paris are the other two big cities) is a part of the Filters of Discovery initiative of the international hotel chain -- one of nine owned by Starwood -- and the event where I met Champenois was timed to coincide with the India Art Fair.

"Mobile photography is the new language of our social media-obsessed world," Champenois said as he went about explaining the connections. After the Obama selfie kerfuffle, don't we know all about it! Travellers "unlock destinations" with the pictures they shoot with their mobiles and they have turned the social media into a global repository of these millions of "picture story books", as Champenois described them. To engage their guests in a more creative way, Le Meridien hotels (#lmfilters) around the world encourage them to Instagram or tweet their mobile photographs, and get rewarded for their work. And by connecting with the art community through the concluding dinner that Le Meridien New Delhi, where the country's many culinary traditions will be showcased to the accompaniment of music by the Bandish Project, Champenois said, the hotel is reaching out to "creative-minded travellers" who are "more plugged in" than the rest of the world.

The Dan Rubin show coincides with the global launch of Le Meridien's signature breakfast, which after nearly four years of carrying American top chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten's stamp, will have a strong local flavour. You can now order a rasam poached egg served with a lentil galette to start your day, or have a baked omelette rolled in a gramflour cheela with tandoori chicken morsels and mint chutney. Craving for an eclair with your coffee? Don't miss the one with ginger and jaggery, or maybe rose and cardamom. Indulge -- and Instagram. That's the new mantra.

GOOD FOOD FOR THE COFFEE TABLE

OK, I did extol the virtues of cookbooks for the new homemaker and hobby cook in the lead piece, but there's still a market for the strikingly illustrated tome that looks good on your coffee table and also has recipes that you can attempt at leisure (and of course, if you're adventurous as well!).

One such cookbook, appropriately titled Taste (Om Books), has been moving fast in the market. You'd  expect it from a cookbook with recipes from four Michelin-starrers (Vineet Bhatia, Vikas Khanna, Frances Aitken and Marcello Tully), Australian celebrity chef Ian Curley, Michelin Rising Star Laurie Gear, and BBC2 cookery show host Anjum Anand. Creative Services Support Group's Anand Kapoor, whose grandfather's Chicken Korma and Coffee Mousse Cake recipes are the ones you must attempt at home, has accomplished the surprising feat of getting the celebrity chefs together to share their best. Having done two annual charity events with these chefs, Kapoor seems to have mastered the art of balancing their egos and managing to get the best out of them, and it shows in the selection of recipes, which are arranged in the form of meals.

Surprisingly, despite the heavyweight presence of Michelin stars, the recipes are not that hard to replicate. Start with Anjum Anand's Fluffy Spinach Koftas in Creamy Tomato Curry, or the New York-based Vikas Khanna's Octopus Chaat and Watermelon Shorba, Ian Curley's Tortellini of Pumpkin and Ricotta, Marcelo Tully's Bread and Butter Pudding, and find out for yourself how these creative powerhouses elevate the simplest pleasures of life.

As He Re-Engineers The Wine Company's Menu, Chef Saby Shares Fabrica's Business Plans

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

I WAS trying to shake off the dreariness of Delhi's weather the other day at my favourite Soda Bottle Openerwala (SBOW) at the DLF Cyber Hub in Gurgaon, when I ran into Megha Kohli, a young chef with the happiest face in the business. I had heard Megha had joined Fabrica, the new company floated by Sabyasachi 'Chef Saby' Gorai, so my newsman's antenna shot up when I saw Megha, her chef's whites showing signs of long hours in the kitchen, at the Cyber Hub.

And sure enough, I learnt that Saby had been signed up by Ashish Kapur to work on The Wine Company menu. That was music to my ears because I believe The Wine Company is a great idea -- where else can you get such decently priced wine in Delhi-NCR -- but its menu has obviously been drawn up by a person who has no clue about wines or wine pairing. You cannot have a wine-driven restaurant without a food menu to complement it. Being a good judge of market realities, Ashish seems to have figured it out soon enough and it shows in his decision to get Saby to rewrite the menu.

After leaving AD Singh, Sabyasachi
Gorai launched Fabrica with a plan to
to roll out concepts in five business
verticals. Image: Facebook

Meeting Megha and Saby's nephew, young chef Subhayan Das, outside SBOW seemed like some sort of a karmic connection at work, for the restaurant was the last project that Saby completed before quitting AD Singh's fast-expanding restaurant empire. It was a calculated risk on the part of Saby, who has found a niche for his unmistakable media persona on television (The Urban Cook on Zee Khana Khazana), but he's working according to a plan that straddles five verticals:

* Roll out middle-to-mass-market food concepts, from gourmet food carts to burger chains, in smaller cities such as Chandigarh Jaipur and Pune. Apart from these turnkey projects, Saby proposes to pursue restaurant consultancies, which he says will provide him "bread and butter" and the wherewithal to grow his business organically. His dream is to create a chain of gourmet stores with restaurants and lecture kitchens on the lines of Eataly, the brainchild of the Italian electronics retailer, Oscar Farinetti.

* Launch a culinary college to produce qualified chefs who will be trained to cater to the burgeoning restaurant industry and its increasingly international standards. Saby is in final stages of talks with a private university in Delhi-NCR and the project is likely to be bankrolled by the scion of an old business house with a growing interest in restaurant concepts. A top equipment maker is developing what promises to be the country's most modern catering college kitchen.

* Create a two-way employment exchange for chefs -- both Indians looking for better openings or jobs abroad and international chefs scouting for career breaks outside their countries. This is one vertical the country badly needs. I wish Saby pays attention to the critical area of training stewards as well!

* Sign up as brand ambassador of food and kitchen accessories brands. This is one good idea, for apart from Sanjeev Kapoor, Vikas Khanna, Ritu Dalmia and Saby (for the upscale German kitchen and household utilities brand, Miele), marketers rarely consider chefs as brand ambassadors in verticals where their world should be the law. If Saby succeeds, he'll give chef-shy food and kitchen appliances brands the courage to bank on chefs. Because Saby, unlike the other three, who became media personalities before they got brand ambassadorships, did not have a television show before he signed up with Miele.

* And last (this one is what I find is most exciting), create a range of 'sprinkle-ons', or cooked powders that you can adds to your food to get a curry kick, for a Japanese marketing agency. Imagine you are having a medium-done steak and you get the urge to sex it up with a balchao flavour, and all you need to do is pick up a sprinkler filled with balchao powder. Saby dreams of the day when these sprinkler would become as common as Tabasco and Capsico at homes and in restaurants.

Dreams have the power to drive you closer to reality. Saby should know this better than most of his other peers.

FORTUNE COOKIE: Vikas Khanna's Gastronomic Romp Across India for Fox Traveller

This is my column, Fortune Cookie, which appears in Mail Today on alternate Thursdays. You can see the original of today's Fortune Cookie at http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=1612014 on Page 15.
Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Vikas Khanna, executive chef of

New York's Michelin-starred 

Indian restaurant, Junoon, has

just completed a television series

on the country's coastal cuisines.

Twist of Taste will aired on

Mondays and Tuesdays on Fox

Traveller, starting on Jan. 20.

HE MAY have fed the Obamas and Junoon, the hugely popular New York restaurant whose kitchen he helms, may have got a Michelin star, but Vikas Khanna doesn't require much goading to slip into charming rusticity of the kind that he says his core audience of "mummyjis and auntiejis" finds reassuring. His travelling food show is about to be aired and he's most nervous about how his GEC (General Entertainment Channel) followers would relate to him.

Being far removed from the GEC demographic, and not being a part of the fan club of MasterChef India, where Vikas is the star anchor, I got down to talking food with him. I am obsessive about chatting up people who travel around the country to discover its food secrets. They come up with the most interesting stories. When Vikas was talking about Ratnagari, I expected him to hold forth on the port city's most famous export, Hapoos, or the mango we know as the Alphonso (followers of Amitav Ghosh, of course, will also remember the city for its rundown Thibaw Palace).

Vikas deliberately missed the mango season so as not to take the road oft travelled. Instead, he met a woman who specialises in making the city's most famous dish, puran poli, a sweet flatbread with a stuffing of boiled chana dal cooked with jaggery. It inspired him to make a crumble cake using the same ingredients -- chana dal, plain flour, jaggery, cardamom and nutmeg powder, and ghee. "I tried to make puran poli the way she was doing it, but just couldn't keep pace with her. You can't beat the master of the trade," Vikas said with his characteristic nervous laugh.

He was also excited about finding another woman who makes tawa-baked cucumber cakes with a cup each of sooji, grated cucumber, milk, jaggery, dahi and ghee. Describing the home-style woman's baking method at length, Vikas exclaimed: "It's amazing how jugadu Indian women can be!" He reinvented this dish for genteel taste buds to make an upside-down cake with cucumber. Wonder what it must have tasted like! From Ratnagiri, Vikas travelled along the country's coastline up to Pondicherry for his Fox Traveller show, Twist of Taste, whose first episode will be aired on January 20. And each stop took him to the doorstep of an extraordinary discovery.

In Goa, he met Odette Mascarenhas, daughter-in-law and biographer of Miguel Arcanjo Mascarenhas, the legendary 'Chef Masci' who had left Goa in 1919 to be a dishwasher at Mumbai's Taj Mahal Hotel and went on to become its first Indian executive chef, appointed by J.R.D. Tata after the Italian who held the position had to leave the country because the British authorities suspected he was spying for his country. At the Mascarenhas household, Vikas learnt how to make a dry prawn currying using mango seeds as souring agent.

Farther south in Kundapur (Karnataka), he met the daughter of the woman who had made the one-horse town's chicken ghee roast an international celebrity. The dish would have disappeared with the death of its creator, had the mother not written letters to her daughter with the family's recipes. In Kerala, Vikas discovered octopus being eaten by common folk. It was his personal a-ha moment because when he put tandoori octopus on Junoon's menu, critics slammed him saying it wasn't an Indian dish. "There's nothing in this world that is not eaten in India," Vikas declared triumphantly.

His most touching moment, though, was when he returned to his alma mater in Manipal, Welcomgroup Graduate School of Hotel Administration, where he failed in the second year and was later honoured with a lifetime achievement award! Manipal was special because he spent whatever time he could at the Sri Krishna Math in Udupi. It was there he learnt how to sing in Kannada, make wood carvings and cook sambhar. In honour of this special relationship, Vikas invented the idli-sambhar jar cake. A befitting tribute from a global soul.

DELHI RETURNS TO REAL PUNJABI FOOD

DELHI OWES its post-Independence identity to Punjab migrants, but ironically, it hasn't had restaurants that serve genuine Punjabi food. As most Punjabis who have grown up eating what their mothers and grandmothers cook will tell you, butter chicken and dal makhni aren't real food -- these are inventions of Punjabi migrants from Peshawar, notably Kundan Lal Gujral, who established the original Moti Mahal at Daryaganj.

In the past three months, Punjabi food served in the city has seen a dramatic turnaround, thanks to three restaurants nursing the ambition of going national. The first off the block was Made in Punjab, a restaurant chain floated by food impresario Jiggs Kalra's son Zorawar. Of course, it has departures from tradition such as the scrumptious Salmon Tikka or the burrah kabab reinvented as the melt-in-the-mouth Tandoori Chaamp, but by introducing the moveable counter that allows tadkewali daal to be made by your tableside, it has freed us from the monotony of deathly dal makhni.

Punjab Grill of Lite Bite Foods, a company floated by Dabur scion Amit Burman and Rohit Aggarwal, has gone the whole nine yards and its winter menu starts with rarities such as Kali Gajar Kanji matured in earthen pots for 72 hours and applewood-smoked Shakarkandi Kamrakh Ki Chaat, bringing back memories of our childhood, and moves on to a heart-warming gelatinous soup made with goat trotters, followed by Bheja Masala, Methi Chicken Tikka and hand-pounded Sarson Da Saag, and Gurhwale Chawal and Bajre Ki Choori for dessert.

This is real Punjabi food, and it has now found a hip protagonist in Dhaba by Claridges, promoted by Sanjeev Nanda. From the witty signs on the walls and the riot of colours everywhere, to the youthful vibe, the fast-paced music and lovable gimmicks such as vodka drinks being christened tharra and served in quarters, Dhaba by Claridges may just succeed in making Punjabi food less intimidating to young people. It has also brought real Punjabi flavours back in fashion with its subtly spiced Dhaba Murgh Roast, fiery Balti Meat and the inventive Kanasteri Baigan Bharta. Great to see restaurants that are proud to be true-blue Punjabi.

CARE FOR A SMOKING HOT MARTINI?

AS LONG as our species has been cooking, smoked food has enjoyed a pride of place on tables across cultures. The smoky flavour touches the subliminal layers of our consciousness, for barbecued meats were the first cooked foods humans savoured after the discovery of fire. And in our culture, smoked foods have had a long history, from the Rajasthani lal maas and the wood fire-baked shakarkandi (sweet potatoes) that you get at this time of the year to the Goan chourico sausages.

Smoked cocktails were bound to follow. Delhi might have been a little late in catching up, but smoked cocktails gradually finding their rightful place on restaurant menus. At Somkey's BBQ & Grill, Masjid Moth, I was mighty impressed by Sherine John's Lock, Stock & A Smokin' Barrel (the name brings back memories of Guy Ritchie's film, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels), where smoked pineapple, teamed up with vodka, vanilla pod and cardamom, does the trick.

On Sunday, K3 at the JW Mariott, New Delhi Aerocity, lines up wood-smoked martinis for patrons of its indulgent brunch. I had the pineapple martini, where roughly crushed pineapple juice and vodka were infused with wood smoke. It wasn't mind-numbingly sweet because fresh fruit had been used. And the smoke gave it a new taste dimension.

THE 1111 DAL MAKHNI FORMULA

MOST people assume that Dal Makhni is an original Punjabi dish, which was brought to our tables by post-Partition migrants from the other side of the border. Ask any Punjabi mother and she'll rubbish the claim. Dal Makhni is an invention of restaurants that sprang up after peace and order returned to Delhi. My friend, restaurateur and caterer Varun Tuli, shocked me the other day by sharing the 1111 Dal Makhni formula -- one kilo each of whole urad dal, full-fat cream, Amul butter and tomato puree followed in most establishments that serve this sludge. Did someone say this was dal?