All About Cooking - Introduction

Food and cooking are an integral part of all cultures, and Indian cooking has an important role in the world of exquisite cuisine. I am excited to share my family's traditional recipes with you! My family came from West Bengal, a region in the eastern part of India. Many of you might be familiar with the name of an important city in Bengal, which is Calcutta or Kolkata, as it is presently called. Bengalis eat a lot of vegetables and a variety of fish, which are mostly river-fish.

According to recent studies, this seems to be the best food-habits in the world. But some meat, e.g. chicken, goat, lamb, are also on the menu, and Bengalis have lip-smacking, finger-licking recipes for all of those items. My grandmother was the mentor for my mother who was an artist in her kitchen, although she definitely didn't have a fancy kitchen with lots of expensive, shiny gadgets. What we learnt from her was - learn the basics, you will be able to cook from Indian to Chinese, from Mexican to Italian. And that's what I do now - I experiment and enjoy cooking from all of those countries and more.

Indian cooking is a lot about spices - knowing the variety of spices grown in Indian subcontinent, and learning how to use them to turn ordinary ingredients into something heavenly! There are a few major spices which are used in almost every recipe, and there are a lot more which are used to enhance the flavour and take day-to-day meals to a whole new level. A lot of these spices have medicinal properties too. Almost everybody now is aware of the properties of ginger which can help fight common cold and flu.

In my grandmother's days, cooking was a chore, not fun. Still they created prized delicacies every single day. We can definitely make cooking fun and creative! Last summer, in my really energetic days, I was painting on a piece of fabric laying it on my dining table, while humming and practising to the tunes of my favourite songs on "You Tube" and a pot of irresistibly flavourful stew with chicken and colourful veggies was bubbling away on the stove. All of you are experts in multi-tasking; you can make cooking a creative, artistic, imaginative, inspiring, and of course mouth-watering activity.

Welcome to my kitchen where I write, draw, sing, and cook at the same time! I am going to share my favourite cooking recipes with you. Bengal is in the Eastern part of India, so it is basically Indian cooking with a regional flavour, a little different from what we usually find in the restaurants. The ingredients are local, fresh, and healthy. My grandmother came from an artsy, creative family who were proud of their scrumptious cooking recipes. In those days, women learned the basic skills to run a family - cooking, sewing, knitting -and also many of them used their artistic abilities drawing, painting, carving on stones.

Cooking was one of those everyday and essential activities, but also a vehicle of their imagination and creativity! My grandmother belonged to a family in East Bengal (presently known as Bangladesh) who had a huge area of lands, and they used to entertain many guests with fresh ingredients grown in their own land with their famous culinary extravaganza. Definitely the crops and vegetables came from their own land, Fish came from their own ponds, or local rivers. Her later life was not the same because of the political situations and because the family migrated to a city in India after partition of Bengal, but she passed on those skills and recipes to her daughters, daughter-in-laws, and grandchildren like me.

While trying each and every of those mouth-watering recipes, I feel close to those women whose talents were not appreciated enough. I love watching the famous chefs on the Food TV network or Gusto Channel, and keep saying to myself, " My grandmother was the best". After living in different regions of India, Middle East and North America for a long time, my cooking is not purely Bengali, or Indian, any longer. The core is Bengali, influenced by the Middle Eastern, philosophy is North American - keep it simple and fast!. But that's how I like it, and my family and friends like it. I get inspired by glamorous chefs like Michael Smith, Laura Calder, Jamie Oliver or Lynn Crawford, and learn tips and techniques, but in my kitchen I am the Queen, I create my recipes by giving an international twist to my grandmother's.

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