TURNING PAGES, SHARING PLATES

IMAGINE eating the same few dishes on repeat in a country as richly blessed with produce, diversity and culinary traditions as ours.

- VERNIKA AWAL is a food writer who is known for her research- based articles through her blog 'Delectable Reveries'

IMAGINE eating the same few dishes on repeat in a country as richly blessed with produce, diversity and culinary traditions as ours. For someone like me—who finds joy in the kitchen and considers the quiet acts of chopping, marinating, stirring and tempering to be as close to therapy as one can get—the idea feels almost sacrilegious.

It's no surprise then that I'm always looking for new recipes, techniques, and regional insights to inspire my time in the kitchen. The simplest and most rewarding way has been to turn to family. I often ask those closest to me how they cook a particular vegetable or dal, and in doing so, I uncover not just recipes, but stories—how they learnt it, who they learnt it from, and what memories are attached to that dish. It becomes an act of documenting the way my family eats, one anecdote at a time.

Then there are friends and neighbours—many of whom trace their roots to different parts of India—offering new perspectives on familiar ingredients. The way the same gourd or green chilli is treated in a Rajasthani kitchen can be wildly different from how it's used in, say, Tamil Nadu. These everyday exchanges are both deeply intimate and wonderfully expansive.