10 DIY Food Kits

 

(This article first appeared online on 17th February 2022 on ZeeZest https://zeezest.com/food/mumbai-s-top-10-diy-food-kits-to-experience-restaurant-style-food-at-home-1357 )

Inside the box

With everything from elaborate, boxed Mughlai 'daawats' to multi-course meals on offer, we acquaint you with a selection of small businesses and home chefs across the city that bring the feast directly to your doorstep!

By Raul Dias

Daawat-e-Ruksariyat

This five-dish, weekend-only daawat (in both veg and non-veg versions) is the brainchild of Jogeshwari-based home chef Ruksar Memon whose daawats or home feasts were such a hit with friends, that she recently started delivering them all across Mumbai. “I had no clue what a home chef is until my friends encouraged me to start my business. I believe that food must be cherished and shared, which is the crux of a daawat,” says Memon, who makes sure to send a small box of dates to kickstart the meal, along with a disposable table/floor cover, as daawats are generally eaten sitting down on the floor. While menu keeps changing every weekend, one can expect to relish appetisers like the signature foil chicken, mains like mutton rogan josh, shahi chicken biryani, paneer makhanwala and desserts like shahi tukra and matka rabdi. Also available on special order is a Memoni Muslim version of khao suey called khausa and a mutton khichda among other a la carte Mughlai dishes.

Cost: Rs. 2,499 onward (daawat for four) and Rs. 1,299 onward (daawat for two)

Call: 9930831336

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Lucknowi Chowk

Dubbed the Nawabi Platter, this six-item meal is a selection of Awadhi cuisine classics by Lucknowi Chowk, a two-month-old Goregaon West-based home chef business. Started by Nirban Goswami who is originally an actor and his fiancee, singer Nandini Deb out of sheer necessity. “Due to the pandemic we were completely out of work and literally broke. So we decided to work on something like cooking that we both are really passionate about,” says Goswami. The platter comprises of a portion of murg biryani and one piece each mutton galouti, kakori and chicken kebabs, along with two portions of breads (sheermal or kulcha). The couple also does fish, chicken, egg and vegetarian Bengali thalas (starting at Rs. 375) made up of dishes like macher kurma, Dhakai murgi, and lao ghonto.

Cost: Rs. 1,599 for a one-person Nawabi Platter

Call: 9821538599

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Spoon of Love

This all-vegetarian, delivery only 'virtual restaurant' operates from Sewri and focuses on Mexican, Lebanese and South East Asian cuisines. It is the idea of hotel management graduate Charmy Mody who calls her two categories of set boxed meals 'lovemeals'. "While ours is a new brand, it is based on an old truth--that when we make things that we love, it just doesn’t feel like work anymore," believes Mody. Both the categories of meals are packed in sealed, biodegradable, pastel pink hued boxes. The Abundant Lovemeal is a four-item box with dishes like a deconstructed falafel for starters and a cottage cheese tsingoi and chilli basil rice for mains. The more elaborate Love Galore box has an additional dish of a khao suey and a dessert of either a salted Nutella shot or a tiramisu cup. Both boxes come with a bottle of water and a disposable cutlery set. Spoon of Love also offers a separate a la carte menu of vegetarian/Jain dishes and desserts.

Cost: Rs. 720 onwards for a one-person Abundant Lovemeal box and Rs. 1,200 for a one-person Love Galore box

Call: 7045699255

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The Cutchi Memon Table

While the name may be at tad 'inspired' the food that is part of Bandra West-based Faiziya Soomar's The Cutchi Memon Table meal box is not. An interesting mix of Bombay Muslim, Kutchi Memoni and a bit of Bengaluru Muslim cuisines go into her boxes that include an appetiser like a couple of Russian cutlets, mains like nalli nihari or Bengaluru style biryani and dessert such as phirni or khubani ka meetha. Learning cooking at a very early age from her cookery class instructor aunt, Soomar is all about experimentation. "I love what I do and continuously try to push the envelope by improvising on my dishes and creating new ones,” says Soomar. And that is why her a la carte menu also has some usual stuff like a white biryani and cashew korma on it.

Cost: Rs. 500 onwards for a one-person meal box

Call: 9820398922

 (An edited version of this review appeared in the 15th December 2020 issue of the Mid-Day newspaper, India on page 15 https://m.mid-day.com/articles/best-home-chefs-small-businesses-in-mumbai-that-home-deliver-food/23143210) 

Holding 'suey'!

With as many iterations as its myriad components, the Burmese dish of khao suey is a well-travelled one.

By Raul Dias

'A sort of Burmese bhel' is perhaps one of the most succinct--if a tad short of being apt--descriptions for khao suey that I recently came across on a pan-Asian, Mumbai-based restaurant's menu card. None of that flowery 'tender morsels of farm-raised chicken, simmered in an unctuous coconut milk broth...' hyperbolic overdrive, menu jargon seem to veer towards these days at most other places. 

For the uninitiated among us (though I highly doubt there would be many), khao suey is a much-loved, and dare-I-say, callously co-opted curried noodle dish of Burmese origin that had been shamelessly adapted and tweaked the world over and here in India in particular. But more on that later. 

Bowls of Sunshine

With its soothing, yet punchy taste, khao suey can easily be classified as a comfort food dish. One that can be scarfed down at anytime of the day like they do in Myanmar and other South East Asian countries. It sees everything from chicken, beef, pork, seafood and even tofu morsels added to a spicy, (mostly) coconut milk- and turmeric-based curry. This bright orange hued curry is then ladled over thin rice noodles to form a soup-meets-stew kind of hybrid dish. 

But hold on! It needs more jazzing up. The supporting acts to the main show take the form of a variety of condiments that range from crispy fried shallots and garlic to halved, boiled eggs, fresh coriander fronds and roasted, crushed peanuts. Each adding textural and flavourful heft to the dish.

As I travelled around Myanmar a few years ago, I realised, that, much like how the word ‘curry’ is misconstrued in the West that divests it of its genericness, khao suey is a similar victim. In the Burmese language, khao suey simply means rice noodles. How one treats those noodles in a dish, creates local variations of what we know commonly as khao suey, the all-in-one meal.

The name game

The dry noodle version of the dish called shwedaung khao suey, that is popular as a street-side snack in places like Yangon, is akin to a crunchy salad. And this is perhaps how the 'Burmese bhel' inference comes into play. While the coconut milk-laden, Southern Myanmarese ohn no khao suey is more in line with the iteration of khao suey we are familiar with in India. 

Crossing the Myanmarese border from the town of Payathonsu into Sangkhla Buri in Northern Thailand via the Three Pagodas Pass, I noticed how easily khao suey had segued into the local cuisine. Known as khao soi Islam, the pork-bereft version (substituted by beef or chicken) is almost similar to ohn no khao suey and is prepared mostly by the Muslim community who prefer adding the locally grown mustard greens in a pickled form to the dish. 

The other neighbour of Myanmar that has its own version of the dish is Laos. This Northern Laotian version also called khao soi is more of a soup made with wide rice noodles, chopped pork and has that unmistakable funky taste of fermented soy beans. All this is topped off with pork rind, coriander and bean sprouts. Interestingly, many are of the belief that the two versions of the shared Singaporean and Malaysian dish of laksa i.e assam (meaning: sour) and curry laksa owe their genesis to khao suey due to their startling similarities. 

Colonial cousins

Perhaps the greatest surprise in store for me on the khao suey front was the rather serendipitous discovery of the Memoni Muslim dish of khausa and how closely it is related to Burmese khao suey. Tasting this truly desi version of the dish at a Memoni food pop-up by a Mumbai-based home chef a few weeks ago, I couldn’t but help marvel at how well the dish had travelled and had gotten adapted along the way.

Often bearing the moniker of the 'sailor businessmen of India,' the Memons, who originally hail from Gujarat, have always had very strong ties to Myanmar since the time it was known as British-occupied Burma. Mainly involved in the pre-independence textile, oil and paper production trade, they would travel to Burma regularly. With a few even settling there permanently and trading from the British set-up port at Akyub, which is in present-day Sitwe.

Many Memons subsequently moved back to India in 1947, with a second exodus taking place in the early 1960s after the Burmese military junta regime, known to be intolerant of foreigners, came into power. Bringing back with them an edible emissary that they named khausa. Adapted to suit their tastes, khausa employs the more Italian-style wheat spaghetti in lieu of rice noodles. This is topped off with a cubed chicken curry made with yoghurt, coconut milk and gram flour. Garnishes take the form of piquant sliced green chillies, ginger juliennes, and crunchy deep-fried samosa dough strips, with a sprinkling of chaat masala giving it an unmistakably desi tadka. 

Sure wins the vote for the most widely travelled and adapted dish, wouldn’t you say?

(An edited version of this article first appeared online in The Hindu Business Line newspaper's BLink section on 5th December 2020 https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/takeaway/khao-suey-is-burmas-global-dish/article33249771.ece)