Prashad At Home: Everyday Indian Cooking from our Vegetarian Kitchen by Patel Kaushy

Author:Patel, Kaushy [Patel, Kaushy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781444734768
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2015-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

I think this actually may be my favourite chapter in the book. It showcases what cooking in our home is all about: the coming together of different cultures and cuisines. Whilst my family’s Gujarati roots are very important to us, as a chef it’s hard not to be inspired by all the wonderful food around me. My husband, Mohan, and I came to live in the UK when I was fifteen and he was sixteen. Back then, it wasn’t easy to get hold of some the ingredients we were used to cooking with, and so we often had to make do with what was available – replacing fresh mango with Bramley apples and colcasia leaves with chard. In this way, those traditional Indian recipes I knew so well quickly evolved to suit my new life, and you’ll have seen lots of examples of this throughout this book. But there were also many new styles of cooking to experience. With so much choice around us – then as well as now – my favourite aspects of different cuisines have found their way very happily into my kitchen.

The children – as all children do – loved it when I cooked something different for them. They were so excited when I didn’t cook curry! Being so used to the lovely warm spices, though, I often had to find ways to include them, and that’s how many of the dishes in this chapter originally came about. As most people who have young children to feed will appreciate, I am not against using a few shortcuts here and there either, and so there’s even a recipe for baked beans on toast (Indian-style, of course), which was always Bobby’s favourite.

Perhaps surprisingly, Italian cuisine is very interesting to an Indian chef and there are quite a few examples in this chapter of my take on those classic Italian dishes. You have to be quite careful adding the cheese that is never far away in an Italian meal, as it tends to dull the spices, but tomato sauces are a dream to work with. Mexican food, which combines tomatoes, cheese and chilli very successfully, has also taught me a lot about matching ingredients. I’m not sure how well known Indo-Chinese cuisine is outside of India but it is hugely popular within India, especially as street food. Mayur, my youngest son, is now championing street food in his own bar venture, Bundobust, in Leeds – I love how food connects us all together like this, coming almost full circle back to those dishes I first cooked when I arrived in the UK. I’ve included examples of each of these types of food over the following pages for you to try.

I owe a lot to my lovely daughter-in-law, Minal, too. There is a saying in India that when people are family, but they feel like ‘more than family’, when you just feel it is ‘meant to be’, it’s because they are souls from a previous life who were related and who have found each other again.

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