Someone asked me once the question so favoured by lifestyle magazines: If there was one food you had to eat every day, what would it be? I think because I didn’t have an answer, or because I have always been so spoilt for choice, I answered: Cyanide.
Like many others in my generation, I was fortunate to travel—first on work, then for pleasure. Friends with good jobs abroad would find exciting eating options, or cook flashy meals. In time, we learnt what we liked to eat, where you could get it and, about the time google transformed from noun to verb, how to cook it.
Even in the 1990s, a dinner party menu could be a geography lesson gone wrong—it would include Russian salad, chhole, gobi manchurian, mutton do piaza, Chinese chilli chicken, Prawn Malay Curry, pulao, puri, rabdi, caramel custard and shondesh, all of it cooked at home (desserts from the halwai) by the earnest hostess, as eager as anyone today to show off. Size really did matter.
These days, style is substance. During the week, most people meet for a drink as dinners are too intense—both for the host who may have to cook, and the perpetual dieter. Drinks is easy—local booze shops are now flush with a wide range of spirits and wines, but when it comes to the eats with the drinks, we just open a packet of chips or peanuts. Or we order India’s favourite cocktail snacks: chicken reshmi kebabs or gobi manchurian.
But opening packets doesn’t always have to lead to peanuts. Off packets, I have been eating bhakri (baked Gujarati biscuits) and Boursin (creamy cheese available everywhere these days) with sliced aam papad as part of cheese platters. This is simple to put together and rather original. Or there are the easy and super elegant steamed shrimps (available shelled and deveined) dipped in Japanese soy sauce, to slightly labour-intensive, but most marvellous beef and lettuce-wraps.
The big entertaining happens over weekends. I believe in playing to the gallery with flashy cooking—the kind that generates envy. I also believe in working less, so these dishes really make an impression with minimal effort. I like the spectacle of one attention-grabbing main course, supported by a salad or a side dish.
Adventurous guests these days seem to enjoy the surprise of a confident menu and like to eat in big, hearty amounts rather than pick at too many small, nondescript and common dishes. A Pork Raja Mirchi with Boiled Vegetables or Cold Sesame Noodles is statement cooking. When you serve Khowswey, it’s the victory of the idea over the food (which is fab too). What’s not to like when guests stand around the table and stare at the food in admiration, then go on to polish off bowls of it in a steamy blur?
Flash in the Pan, a guide to what to cook, and how, by Tushita Patel will be published this month by Westland Books.
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Khowswey (SERVES 6)
This is my style of cooking—if there is such a thing. A one-dish dinner with little effort and immense wow factor.
Ingredients