SPICE UP SUMMER
| Published date | 26 June 2021 |
| Date | 26 June 2021 |
| Publication title | Birmingham Mail (England) |
think it will take hours or sometimes days where you soak and you ferment - which is all true, but it's not how we cook every day," she says with exasperation.
Although it's seven years since Chetna appeared on The Great British Bake Off, she's still roundly referred to as a 'Bake Offfavourite' - and now she's onto her fifth cookbook: Chetna's 30 Minute Indian: Quick And Easy Everyday Meals. It's her latest challenge to preconceived ideas around Indian food; in 2019's Chetna's Healthy Indian she turned the idea that "Indian means greasy and unhealthy" on its head, she explains.
There was another huge driving force behind her latest book: the pandemic. Like so many cooks, Chetna noticed a shift in our approach to food over the past year or so.
She says her new cookbook was "written in the first lockdown [in 2020], completely at home. There was a big surge of trying all these amazing sourdoughs and breads at home, and what I saw with my friends was it started with a bang - and then after a few weeks, everyone was just like, 'I don't want to cook, and I don't want to spend so much time in the kitchen!"' This got Chetna thinking more deeply about what kind of food people want to cook, and she had a lightbulb moment.
"Maybe it's a good idea if I could do something in 30 minutes," she thought.
A taste what's come Chetna
The idea of whipping up a delicious dish in just 15 minutes makes her belly-laugh, but it would seem like 30 minutes is the sweet spot.
And no, Chetna says almost wearily, it's not just a book of cur-
ries. There are some delicious curry meals catering to all different spice levels, but it's got recipes for "everything - a bit of starters, a bit of snacks, some big meals, some small meals, for all seasons". This book was a unique experience, she says, because lockdown meant her children (Sia, 13 and Yuv, 11) could see firsthand how it all came together. Luckily for Chetna, her kids ended up being a big help.
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"They would be like, 'Mum how many recipes have you done? Mum, have you done 10 or not?', because they knew my deadlines,"
she says with a laugh. For Chetna, one of the silver linings of lockdown was the opportunity to actually get her children to understand what she does for a living.
"I was glad because they actually saw how much hard work goes into writing a book," she says. "It's not just like, 'Oh, I'm writing a cookbook'."
They also ended up being her best and...
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