A new way to cook traditional Indian food.
In a traditional Indian home, the mother and wife do not work outside the home. She stays at home and spends her days making sure her family has healthy, delicious food to eat whenever they want. If there are other older women in the house, like aunts or a grandmother, they will also help.
An Indian girl will start learning how to cook at a very young age, and her mother will expect her to help with cooking and cleaning around the house. A daughter will learn from her mother how to grind spices, mix them to make different masalas, and know when and how to put them in different dishes. She will learn how to make chapati, roti, paratha, and other kinds of bread. She will learn how to make several dishes at once. An Indian meal never has just one dish, and she will also learn how to make the crispiest onion bhajis and pakora. The girl's skill in the kitchen can make or break her chances of getting married.
Even though Indian food is delicious, even for the most experienced Indian housewife, making a meal is a complicated and time-consuming process.
That's how it's always been done. But life is very different in modern India and in Britain, where many Indian families have settled.
Most Indian women don't have the time or money to stay at home all day these days. They want to go to work or have to. Indian girls who grow up in Britain see other girls their age going shopping, to parties, seeing friends, to school, to college, and eventually to work, and they don't want to stay at home with their mothers and work over a hot stove. They also don't want to lose the culture and tastes of Indian food.
What should you do when Indian cooking doesn't give you a quick way to make a meal? Vicky Bhogal has figured out what to do. In her book, Cooking Like Mummyji, she looks at the food problems of a modern Indian girl living in Britain and gives an interesting answer.
I guess we'd call this "fusion cooking," since it combines the flavors of Indian food with the simplicity of British family food. The result is a great food that takes as little time as possible to make. I especially like the Fishcakes with Bite and the Green Masala Roast Chicken for a different Sunday lunch. Both are delicious.
