A #foodle of Prawns Moilee and the Mumbai Launch of Masterchef Kunal Kapurs new book A Chef in Every Home

Chef Kunal Kapur loves my #Foodles so i created this one specially to dedicate to his first book.

As a MasterChef India judge and Celebrity Chef Kunal Kapur really does not need an introduction. I was most honoured to be invited to unveil his first cookbook, ‘A Chef in Every Home’ at the Leela in Mumbai a few days ago.

I got there early which was fortunate because I got a chance to talk with Kunal over a cup of coffee at the Citrus restaurant while we were waiting for the event to start. A book by this rising star of India’s Culinary scene certainly has been long overdue. More so when you consider that his co-judges on the famous food reality show are several books ahead of him already. But then at 34, Kunal HAS had a headstart on most of his contemporaries so I suspect the best of him is still to come. From being the 'chief stirrer' in his father's kitchen as a child he went on to become a graduate of Hotel Management from Chandigarh, worked with the Taj Group of Hotels, is today the Executive Sous Chef, The Leela, Gurgaon and has some very interesting plans for the future!  

So what is the book all about?

In his own words, “Masterchef India showed me that good food can come from anyone. I realised that there is a chef in every home. I wrote this book to inspire that chef in every home to cook and keep enjoying himself.”

What was the book writing journey like? How long did it take?

The project took almost one-and-half years. You see, I am a Chef, I cook in a certain way everyday, I have tons of recipes to draw from but I was very clear that I wanted to put in recipes that could be cooked at home. Every dish included in the book can be cooked with the regular ingredients available in a normal household kitchen. While 80 per cent of the dishes are international most of them are familiar. Also when you cook yourself, you don't need to think much. But when you put it down for end-user you have to make things simpler and specific and that took time as well.

Which recipe is most memorable?

The Aubergine and Peanut Chutney on pg 48. It’s a recipe by an aunt of mine who makes awesome chutneys.

Just then Kunal was called away and I had a chance to browse through the book.

Name: A Chef in Every Home | Written By: Chef Kunal Kapur |List Price: Rs. 599

First Look: Published by Random House India. Like most of their books, this book is also of excellent production quality of international standards and lovely pictures shot by Shirish Sen. The recipes contained seemed to offer a smorgasbord of dishes from around the world that promised to suit a variety of palates, moods and occasions; from starters, dips, salads and soups to wholesome and hearty main courses, healthy and fun option for kids, breads, rice and desserts. 

I was mentally filing away page numbers of the recipes that looked interesting when I was called over as it was time to get on with the launch event. The unveiling was fun, with Mayank Shekhar, Aman Sehrawat and me doing the honours of unveiling Kunal’s book. This was followed by a little cooking demo in which Kunal cooked a few recipes from his book; a Bruschetta and the most AMAZING Prawn Moilee that I HAD to go home and cook that same night.

Final Takeaway: I do recommend this book.  If you're a new cook, eager to try your hands in the kitchen, what better person to learn from than someone as accomplished as Kunal? And the remarkable variety means that there is a lot to pick from; Menaskai, a spicy pineapple curry from Karnataka, Mutton Varuval, Char Siu Mutton Chops. I also love all the little stories around each recipe. One can get recipes anywhere, albeit not with the little twists applied by Kunal like in the case of the Potli Masala Creme Brulee, but the stories make them special. It’s like Kunal is sharing more than just a recipe. My only grouse is, I wish there had been some more of Kunal’s signature recipes in the book. As one of the few chef cookbooks out there, I’d personally have liked to get a deeper insight into the cook he is. And the one beef I have, more with the publisher than Kunal, is that there are too many editiorial errors in this book, it’s something that has happened in my book as well and when a publisher works so long on a manuscript these errors really are avoidable. But this is a first book and first books also teach us a lot that we can avoid in subsequent books and like I said I have a feeling Kunal is just starting out. The best from him is yet to come. And I am looking forward to that.

What I cooked.

I cooked the Prawns Moilee that same night. It was so good that I had to.

Prawns Moilee from the book.

This is a very popular dish from the coastal state of Kerela, India. Moilee sauce is now fancied the world over with big restaurants now serving in different forms in their restaurants. The uniqueness of the sauce is its subtle flavors of coconut and curry leaves. Almost anything vegetable or meat dropped in this sauce comes out tasty.

Serves 2 | Preparation Time: 10 min |Cooking Time:  20min

Ingredients
Prawns (medium) – 12 nos
Coconut oil – 2 tbl spn
Fenugreek – 1tsp
Dry red chilly – 2 nos
Ginger julienne – ½ cup
Garlic chopped – ¼ cup
Onion Sliced – 1 cup
Green chilli slit – 1no
Curry leaves – 2 sprigs
Tomato diced – 1 ½ cup
Turmeric – 1 tsp
Tamarind – 1 tbl spn
Black pepper powder – ½ tsp
Salt – to taste

Method
·         Heat coconut oil and add mustard seeds and dry red chillies. Once it crackles add curry leaves, sliced onions, green chilly, ginger and garlic. Sauté till it just starts to brown.
·         Now add turmeric and sauté over low heat. Add tomato dices and sauté.
·         Now add coconut milk mixed with 1 cup water. Cook the curry on slow heat and after 5 mins, drop the prawns and pepper powder.
·         Add tamarind pulp to the curry to adjust the acidity and check for salt. Serve hot with steamed rice

My book, your book Mutual admiration society!

Slow Simmer…. when perfectly matched ingredients come together... valentine special

This Valentine’s Day, Shekhar and I will have been together for 17 years. We have been married for fourteen-ish of those. Last Sunday, we hosted a special Couples Cooking class for the 4th year in a row. Ironically, this came after a week that was crazy for us, as never before. For the first time in all the years we have been together, we both felt stretched to within an inch of forbearance on all fronts….

Putting our best foot forward on Sunday was a little difficult but as the six couples joining us to cook together arrived at the studio, I found and Shekhar and me loosening up and getting into the groove… I remember joking that Shekhar and I loved cooking together and wanted to introduce them to it because we had found that when you have been together for so long, sitting across a table over a candlelight dinner is the most boring activity EVER. I was gratified at the end of that Sunday day all of them unanimously agreed that it was the most fun they had ever had together, but I was only half joking about the romantic dinner bit.

When a couple juggles so much – and most couples in Mumbai do, mooning into each other’s eyes is the last thing one wants to do when there is a block of time. I don’t mean to sound cynical, Shekhar and I do enjoy the occasional ‘date’ but it is usually for lunch (when we have babysitters) in our most comfortable (read unflattering) clothes and more as two friends taking time out to enjoy things we both love, food, a good movie than for romantic timeout… Of course we LOVE to cook together. Now that is something we do together really often. But it took us the better part of 17 years to reach this synchrony.

At the soft launch of APB Cook Studio

After class, Shekhar left to go home to the kids and I followed after winding up the studio for the day. I reached home to find him making Natasha finish homework. Exhausted from the day we shared a chaotic quick dinner; spicy sausage pasta I had tossed up and some ciabatta he had made with Aman, our little gourmand (in EVERY sense of the word) hovering between us demanding bites and Natasha singing “do you want to build a snowman” for the 1000^th time

I remember thinking then amidst the chaos, that this was home. This is why people get married; not for social approval, sex or financial trappings, but to build a home. Not of walls, a roof or floors but a structure nonetheless, one that withstands storm, fire, fury and time; a home for souls to come home to, to hold and to hug, to keep worries and turbulences of life at bay. You know that saying – “tough times don’t last, tough people do”… its true… I realised that nothing is as bad as we make it. And bad times pass.

I will leave you with this extract on us that did not get into my book. I wrote this 3 years ago but found myself coming back to it today...

Making sure I am ok in a particularly stressfull event.

There is more valentine’s day chatter all around me this year than ever before and I wanted to share with young lovers - that romance isn’t about the hearts and flowers, expensive meals and gifts… it IS about finding a friend, a best friend who will support you through everything, be your lover, your anchor and your inspiration but also that person you can talk to and laugh with when the passion is muted by life and time and you have only one another... so don’t let the noise fool you…

Made for Each Other

14 years ago, give or take a few months, on an August morning in Hyderabad, Shekhar walked into my life. Irreverently dressed in a banyan and carrying a guitar. A GUITAR! How could I NOT have noticed him? It was a while before we even talked, but I noticed him again and again all day that day as I settled into my new life at the animation institute I had joined. Over the following months, we talked (or rather I talked and he listened), and we became friends. Living on campus, we were soon dining together and our relationship grew into that indefinable stage between just friendship and a steady (but uncategorised) relationship.

One day, I caught myself feeling gratified when he picked up something he liked from my plate. I mentally rebuked myself for being so silly but realised that I had been feeling like that every time I stole a papad (we only got one) from his plate. There are profound differences among communities in India but one thing is universal. The sanctity of one’s plate and the concept of ‘Jutha’. Jutha is hard to explain. The word that comes closest to it in English is ‘defiled’ but even that falls short of the true meaning. Jutha means that everything within the rim of one’s plate is kosher for that person, but jutha for anybody else. It is considered extremely rude and unhygienic to offer someone your ‘jutha’, something from your plate, or something you have taken a bite out of.

So my straying into Shekhar’s plate, and him allowing me to, was a sort of blurring of the lines of propriety between two people of the opposite sex. The semantics of our relationship were slowly changing and our eating habits were reflecting this change. And finally we went from picking food from one another’s plates to sharing a plate. We drank from the same glasses, tasted food from each other’s spoons and occasionally fed each other by hand. We took pleasure in doing little things for each other. One sultry summer evening in April he asked me to ‘go steady’ (for want of a better phrase), under a canopy of stars. The following week was the only week in my life I barely ate. I was just so excited that nothing mattered except being with him.

A year later we moved back to Mumbai to carve a future for ourselves. One that looked almost impossible, sometimes. As backgrounds went, we came from vastly different families. Everyone thought I was making a mistake and HAD to let me know! Family, friends, the corner grocer, my beautician, EVERYBODY was into the ‘enlighten Rushina’ movement. Their trump card... ‘’You don’t even know how to even cook, how are you going to run your house?’’

They didn’t know that at the table, Shekhar and I had understood each other a long time ago. We were complete opposites in our food choices. He liked tea, I liked coffee, he tripped on Indian sweets, I loved handmade chocolate. He didn’t like chicken, I did. When we ate out, he’d want Indian and I’d want Chinese. But by the time we left Hyderabad, dinner out meant making a long journey to Reshmi Dhaba in Secunderabad for our favourite meal of chunky ginger spiked Hot and Sour soup (for me) and succulent Tandoori chicken (for him). And in Mumbai, on the frugal income we had in those days, the food we ate was never fancy but if we were together, even a Frankie tasted better, the amchur tangier, the chillies spicier, accentuated by the infinite awareness of each other.

That year Shekhar also passed the ‘will stay by your side through everything test’ after surviving my early attempts at cooking! Untrained in the kitchen, I first learned to cook simple meals of dal and rice from him in the little kitchen his rented apartment had. And then unleashed my creativity in his kitchen (a far cry from what it means for the Rushina of today to get creative in the kitchen).

Like the time I ruined Polenta in an attempt to recreate the flavours of Italy on my return from a holiday there. You can imagine how bad it must have been by the fact that my husband still gags at the very mention of Polenta! Or the time I thought I was doing something really brilliant by making Chilli con Carne with the South African Biltong Mom brought back from one of her trips. All I did was substitute the beans with chickpeas, eliminate the wine and use Biltong (which is dried meat jerky) instead of meat. Yep, that’s all I did, HONEST.

So I am convinced that animated heart shapes flew out of my eyes the day he proposed marriage to me. (Especially after my Biltong mess was summarily flushed down the loo.) Over the next few months, many hurdles were overcome, our families came together and the date arrived. The next 10 days went by in a whirl of meeting a huge extended family and before we knew it we were headed back to a life as husband and wife in our new apartment in Mumbai.  Shekhar left for work the very next morning and I embraced my new life with a vengeance.

I now had my own kitchen! The first thing I did was to stock the kitchen with provisions. Only thing was that coming from a big family of 20, I didn’t know how to do anything in small quantities and ordered enough groceries to last six months! I had stuff falling on my head for weeks afterwards! But I savoured the experience of unwrapping all my new Tupperware boxes, filling them to the brim with staples and stacking all the blue lidded boxes neatly in rows in the kitchen cupboards. When I was done, I found I had little handfuls of various pulses and lentils leftover. On a whim, I decided to make Dal Kebabs as a special dinner that night. Entirely from my imagination! Thankfully they turned out well and the first dinner I made for my husband was a success. I cannot believe how cheesy I was!  

That day, my indulged childhood ended, I had crossed a threshold into my grown up life. As long as I was single, I never thought about my meals. Living in a large joint family, I was simply required to be present at mealtimes, choose what appealed to me and eat. Now the responsibility for meals, the RDBS I had once groaned over, became mine. Those first months were an adventure as I juggled, running a kitchen, a two hour commute to work and back across town daily and managing a house.

Shekhar has survived the kitchen disasters of my early married years, when I went from cooking occasionally for a family of 20 to cooking daily for 2. That week of the Purple Pasta - NEVER EVER add red cabbage to anything unless you want purple results - and not terribly royal ones either! And the Cheese Pebble Cookies that turned out hard as rocks, and the Thai Curry that burnt our innards so bad we had to eat yoghurt for a week! He survived my ‘one - dish wonder’ years – when I became EXTREMELY proficient at cooking meals that required just one bowl to cook and serve in (it meant less dishes to wash at the end of the long days we both had). And my Thai high, the phase in my life when I was so obsessed with Thai that I cooked it EVERY week.

Making pasta with Aman a few years ago.

He loves my cooking and makes no bones about it. He spends weekends and most weekday mornings, baking up delicious stuff for us, thereby ensuring I don’t look bad as a Mom because I am bread challenged. On Pizza nights he does the bases and I do the sauce; when we do wraps, he will make the wraps and I do the fillings; he makes fab dosas and I do my devilish sambhar. He will refuse to eat Italian outside because he says I cook it the best. Its taken us the better part of 17 years to reach where we are in the kitchen. 
The best dishes are the slow simmered one....