There’s little doubt that jobs in IT and IT enabled services test the limits of creativity. Perhaps it’s this skill that makes techies excel in other creative fields – dancing, music, writing, art, cooking… Technopark, apparently, is home to many culinary artistes.
Just check out the number of amateur chefs who cook up a storm for UST Global’s Yummy Aid, an annual charity food sale, or those who actively take part in ubiquitous payasam contests for Onam. In fact, several of the amateur chefs are so good and instinctive at the art of cooking that their friends and colleagues say that they should open up restaurants or, at the very least, sign up for reality shows like Masterchef .
“Been there done that!” laughs Avaneesh M., by day the head writer and chief editor of Technopark-based animation firm Toonz, a doctor by evening and a well-known pastry chef by night! He is the winner of the first edition of Kairali TV’s cookery reality show Kitchen Magic .
“I have been interested in cooking ever since I can remember. Well, my brothers, my father and I had to learn to cook if we wanted to eat something palatable – my mother, Indira, is not exactly the world’s greatest cook! Inevitably, her dishes would be overcooked or undercooked or burnt or missing ingredients like salt and chilli. So we all just took over the kitchen,” he says with a grin. Avaneesh has now moved on to pastry and runs a cakery, The Cakeholic. “Sculpting, carving and icing cakes is my passion,” he adds.
According to him and several others too, Rathan Sam George, Toonz’ Head of Asia Pacific, is an “even crazier cook”, the kind who keenly experiments with different kind of cuisines to create something scrumptious.
“Eating is my hobby; I find eating comforting and stimulating,” says Rathan. “The best way to eat good food is to cook it yourself. I have thus been cooking for myself ever since I started living alone in the city some nine years ago. I love cooking Kerala Christian food – beef Olathu, appam and stew and the like and enjoy giving it a twist with ingredients, sauces and spices from other cuisines,” he adds.
For instance, yesterday Rathan made ‘Minced beef stuffed saucy chicken with cherry tomatoes’. It is minced beef cooked Kerala style and stuffed in chicken that was marinated with Chinese seasoning, steamed and shallow fried and tossed in a sauce made with Italian herbs and red wine vinegar, and served with a side dish of fried cherry tomatoes!
“If I can say so myself it was delicious! Nowadays, it is very easy to get exotic ingredients, sauces, cheeses and the like here in the city, all of which fires my instinct to cook. My dream is to open a fusion restaurant one day,” he adds.
Admittedly, not all of them are as experimental about cooking as the duo, but most of them can whip up delicious vegetarian and/or non-vegetarian food within minutes. Midhun Raj, for example, is a whiz at non-vegetarian cooking and cooks daily with his roommates Aravind, Prasanth, and Manu.
“I started cooking because I couldn’t stand the taste of coriander leaves, which is always a part of hotel food here in the city. Back home in Pala we never use it for cooking,” says Midhun, a software engineer.
The quartet who are very “kitchen proud” say that they make breakfast, lunch and dinner daily. On the weekends they experiment. “We’ve come up with some ways of saving time while cooking. For instance, we steam puttu in an idli thattu – which means you can get four puttu servings in one go! When we have time on the weekends we make items such as kappa biriyani,” adds Midhun.
Maxon C.J., Sreekesh Narayanan and their flat mates, who have been living together for four years now, also run a well-oiled home kitchen.
“We enjoy cooking ethnic dishes – avials, thorans, kalans and the like,” says Maxon, who works in IT support. Sreekesh, who works as an analyst with an MNC, is their resident vegetarian expert and experimenter-in-chief. “I am trying out various vegetarian items from across the country,” he says.
Happy cooking!
