CHENNAI: Even as a child, I liked cooking. If I remember correctly, I was eight when I cooked my first dish but I don't remember what I made (laughs). I love cooking because it is a creative process. In cooking, we innovate and evolve every day and that's the best part about it.
I mostly cook South-East Asian cuisines. I was driven towards this category of cuisine because of my mother's mixed heritage — she is half Indonesian half Dutch. So, I grew up eating Indonesian food. When I started this as a profession about 30 years ago, there were no restaurants that offered Thai-Indonesian cuisines. Since I knew the food very well, I explored the opportunity.
My favourite dish is the Burmese Khau Swey which is basically a soupy noodle with coconut. It also contains spring onions, fired onions, chili sauce, garlic and peanuts. My second favourite dish is tandoori chicken because it is very different from what I cook. Another reason is because it is more like a homely dish to me since I grew up in Delhi.
There is also a chef's mentality that he/she won't be craving for the cuisine he/she cooks every day. I believe that a chef should always be innovative and he/she should always update his/her taste receptors to new and different taste all the time. This is also a way to evolve.
I also like Chinese food a lot because it is comfort food. I believe making deserts are boring because it has limited room for creativity unlike normal cooking. Hence I enjoy hardcore cooking more than making ‘after food’ deserts.
If you want to try a simple vegetarian dish at home, I would suggest making ‘stir fried vegetables’. It's a simple and healthy dish. You hardly use any oil; instead you just should brown the garlic with any combination of vegetables. The ingredients include black pepper, light soya sauce and vegetarian oyster sauce.
I tend to add just a pinch of sugar in my dishes for flavour. When I make fish fillet, I marinate the fish in lime juice. While cooking, I add a little chicken stock to the fish sauce, as it gives a unique taste to the fillet.
The cuisine I love to experiment is hardcore French cooking. I will only try doing that after my retirement because, right now I have so much to experiment in the South East Asian category itself.