Food from scratch

Rustling up a DIY recipe offers a good high as just about anything in the kitchen can be used to create nutritious food while also experimenting with an interesting array of alternatives, writes Nandita Iyer

The world took to making banana bread and dalgona coffee with a vengeance when the pandemic locked us up at home without access to people and places around us in 2020. It has triggered a streak of self-reliance in a lot of people around the world. The lockdown and the risk involved in visiting crowded markets brought street food into our kitchens. Chaats like golgappas with multiple components like puris, fillings and chutneys are all being made from scratch.

With the lockdown and other pandemic-driven restrictions on our lives, we ended up doing a lot of things ourselves, which otherwise would have been bought or outsourced. In doing so, we realised that making things with our hands is a fulfilling experience. DIY became our mantra to survive the pandemic.

Nurturing skills

There are some skills to enhance and transform your everyday life. Four of these skills are food-related, which include baking, spices, fermentation and kitchen gardening. Do away with the pressure to be an expert in any of these to be able to cater to ourselves and our family. We don’t need to know how to make professional pastry chef-level bakes. A simple cake baked at home adds to everyday joys that contribute to a beautiful life. For example, baking at home becomes a bonding exercise for the whole family and it comes without the preservatives and additives that are usually a part of commercial bakes.

Similarly, everyone could do with a bit of gardening, be it a few pots on the windowsill or a patch in your residential complex. Plants are the cheapest way to beautify spaces and if these are food plants, the benefits are aplenty. Even if you are growing just salad greens or herbs or chillies, you are in a way contributing to the food production in the world and being self-sufficient in a little way. Having a little kitchen garden also encourages us to compost our food waste and use the compost to nourish the soil, thereby our food completing a full circle and nothing going into the landfills.

A spiced advantage

Learn how to compost, how to make a banana peel enzyme, how to grow a beautiful herb container as there is so much joy in picking fresh chillies and curry leaves from the window sill plant to add to the tadka in dal. These gardening basics will be the baby steps towards growing your own grub. Freshly ground spices have the added advantage of not having any adulterants, fillers or preservatives. Additionally, these can be custom-made as per your dietary and taste preferences. Apart from spice blends, spices can also be used to make infused oils, salad dressings, condiments like chilli sauce, kasundi, spice pastes, pickles, rubs and marinades, spice-infused alcohols and vinegar.

(The writer is the author of This Handmade Life published by Penguin India.)