For the love of food

There are unsung heroes in each home, cooking with immense love and affection, day in and day out!
Its time to celebrate them again!

It is so good to meet someone who cooks for the pure love of food...and our feature today is about that very person, Anjali Ahuja, a successful  HR professional, and a budding facilitator and coach, and above all, a wonderful human being.

Just as much as she likes to live life to the fullest, she loves food in totality - eating and cooking! In her own words, "food for her is more than just taste, it's about creating memories, its about caring and loving, how each hand has a unique taste to it. Cooking is therapeutic and food is nothing less than a healer".

Her brother Rahul just loves her cooking and she feels she cooks for the sheer love of him. She recounts that "he does not care where on earth  I am, whenever he is hungry, he pings 'main kya khaun didi' and when at home, he keeps her on her toes "kuch acha bana de".
She is used to lovingly preparing halwa for him at wee hours of the night and she wonders if her brother likes to pester her for halwa at night just to relive the sweet memories of their grandmother who used to cook for them at any time in the day or night! He finds everything Anjali makes simply exotic, even if it is a simple sandwich! She remembers how she once burnt his parantha and he relished and gobbled it up saying "its very good, crispy, just the way I like it". He knows we all need that one smile after someone takes in the first bite...he is a sheer joy to cook for, touchwood :)

And she is no simple cook, she is a super chef ! She has inherited the art of preserving food as pickles and jam from her beloved Nani and Dadi. She loves preparing kanji, ladoos, kheer, namakparas and what not! Anjali loves to keep the tradition alive and her love of cooking is an effort to do so!

Anjali lovingly shared with us her red chilly jam recipe. It turned out to be an amalgamation of flavours, spicy, sour, sweet with a lil tinge of garlic! A must try:

Red chilly Jam

Ingredients:

250 g red pepper chillies 

30 cloves of garlic 

250 g sugar 

300 ml vinegar 

1/4 tsp salt 

Method:

1. Cut red chilly peppers and de-seed them, keep some of the seeds... make a paste of chilies and garlic.

2. In a pan, add vinegar and sugar, and cook until the sugar dissolves and starts to bubble.

3. Add the chilly garlic paste and salt.

4. Cook till about 30 mins to get the jam consistency.

Ta ra ra - the jam is ready! No preservatives and lasts well a month - go today - do the zigetty zagetty zoom and get the jam ready!