My love for cooking started when I first went to England in 1965. The area where we were living people only knew typical British food. And as an Indian I also had the same problem because I had never even imagined what foreign food looks like never mind what it taste like. The problem was how do I make and eat Indian food without the required spices or ingredients. However, I slowly had to find ways to make palatable dishes with whatever was available in terms of spices. The effort of making food to suit my own taste got me interested in trying dishes which turned out slightly different but unique and tasty. This was the start of my passion for creating new dishes, and also collecting recipes. This change evolved into my love of making variety of dishes for my family and friends. My effort was rewarded as my style of dishes gained popularity and demand. I started making, tasting, and testing dishes from different world cuisines.All my friends asked for my recipe and encouraged me to write a cookbook. That inspired me not only to start writing recipes but also on learning the important cooking techniques for a greater confidence and control over the variety of dishes that I wanted to create. The more I cooked, the more I realized that knowing the exact reason for best or worst result in the final product depended on the knowledge of important tips and techniques in cooking. That was the start of a pursuit in learning, recording, and practicing the important techniques not only in cooking but especially in baking to get a perfect results. Knowing the cause why a cake goes flat, or how to prevent yogurt from breaking in a hot sauce gives a cook the needed confidence and control over the process or results in success. On a regular basis cooking is done as a chore with very limited knowledge of cooking techniques. And time and time again, for novice home cooks, lack of knowledge results in failures which discourages them from attempting anything different.
It took a lot of reading, researching, and practicing for me to learn a lot about the techniques. And I wanted to share the knowledge and help others to get the benefit of my effort. I decided that the best way would be to write a book to share the knowledge. I also saw it as beneficial for my grand children to have a handbooks for cooking and baking.
After 50 years this dream of writing a cookbook materialized. My first book “Rasheeda’s Family table” was published in July, 2017. This book is a collection of Indian, British, African, Chinese, Korean, and Mexican dishes with some of the selected dessert in each section. When this book came out people started to wonder why I didn’t put more dessert recipes in the book. A lot of my friends pointed out that the techniques in baking are very important and would have been so helpful to know them.
Therefore, the idea of writing a book on baking techniques with a collection of recipes for easy desserts was born. I started to work on a baking book “Understanding Baking”, which was published in August,2018.
It was not difficult for me to put together the material since I had been working, collecting, making, testing, tasting, and writing recipes for a long time. Here we are with two books in the market which are really so easy to use even for novice bakers. Hope everyone buys and uses them.
