RECIPE NOTE: This goes beautifully with bitter lemon, mustard seed & garlic pullao (p 100), or with sourdough as a quick lunch.
RECIPE NOTE: If you can’t find crispy fried onions, make them yourself: fry 3 thinly sliced red onions in 100ml sunflower oil, in batches, then drain on paper towel.
Both of my grandmothers and my mother cooked without recipes, recollecting and recreating meals using their senses. I grew up around this way of cooking called andaza, which translates as ‘estimation’, but really encompasses what I like to think of as the art of sensory cooking.
There was always life in our kitchen – it was almost a sacred space, the female domain, willingly occupied not from a sense of duty but rather a sense of ownership and togetherness. The kitchen was a place of effortlessness, of belonging and of strength, and as a child it was my place of consistency and comfort.
My teenage years in Pakistan took place during a turbulent time of martial law and political strife. The kitchen was the one place I felt secure; there was something about its dependability in my life that made it feel like home.
This is my coming-of-age story, about
