CHENNAI : When you scout Instagram accounts for healthy home-made cooking to follow, chances are high that Masterchefmom would be among the top suggestions. This Instagram page is run by a New Delhi-based homemaker Uma Raghuraman. She is popular in fusing Indian and international cuisines.
Uma was recently in the city for a Christmas baking workshop for children at Palladium. “The mothers were encouraging, supportive and thrilled to see their little ones whisk their batter, frost the cupcakes and roll out their cookies. I taught them to bake their entire Christmas spread of double chocolate cupcakes with vanilla buttercream frosting, sugar cookies with icing, sandwich confetti, and bread pizzas,” said Uma, who always looks for reasons to come to her native place, Chennai.
Uma quit her job in 2014, to be a stay-at-home mom and started sharing the recipes she created in her kitchen on social media. What started out as an effort to make her children eat healthy became a huge hit and people wanted her to share detailed recipes, the process and stories behind the dishes. That culminated in her blog ‘Masterchefmom’.
The page has 1,431 recipe posts and more than 65,000 followers. “Blogging involves its own challenges. Right from cooking, styling and photographing, the entire process involves 12-14 hours of work to produce and present quality content. Using a smartphone to click pictures has been my strength. One needs to know the composition of food and capture the item under natural lighting to get an appealing image,” she said.
Uma is grateful to her family for their support. Cooking together as a family during weekends has become a ritual. She calls her mother and mother-in-law her inspiration and feels blessed to be bestowed with heirloom recipes from them like varieties of rasam, sambhar, kuzhambu, sweets, snacks and festival treats. One habit that she has emulated from them is cooking in clay pots and traditional vessels.
“Even as a child, I steamed cakes (idlis) and jam sandwiches. I also used to love to assist my grandmother in making gulab jamuns and steamed dumplings (kozhukattais). I loved playing with the dough. Potatoes used to be my favourite vegetable and peeling the warm baby potatoes was a task that my mother assigned to me always,” said the home chef.
Uma is on a mission to popularise delicacies from various regions of India and share the right techniques of cooking in an authentic manner. Her food presentation skills are a combination of her love for handloom and food. Be it sweets or savouries, the home chef carefully places the cooked item inside a copper or clay vessel on a plantain leaf and present it on a sari with a kolam on the backdrop.
“Through my blog, I want to inspire young mothers to cook healthy, creative and interesting dishes that will not only excite the person who eats but also bring loads of enthusiasm to the person who cooks. The rise of mother bloggers is healthy progress. Instagram is a learning field and not a battlefield. I would love to conduct workshops and coming out with a great cookbook is a dream project,” said Uma.
Achievements
Uma’s innovative presentation skills bagged her an award in 2017 — she was the winner of Netflix Asia’s My Chef’s Table Instagram Contest. The contest was about creating an innovative dish and presenting it in the most creative way. The mother of two became the Indian Ambassador for Chef’s Table, visited Los Angeles, and met the famous Chef Nancy Silverton.