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Books: Being creative with food & life
Nandita Iyer’s book on life skills guarantees that we will never flounder through another lockdown again
“I’ve just finished a five-day shoot in Delhi-NCR for a website and I’m back home to daily routine in Bengaluru, eagerly awaiting the copies of my book, This Handmade Life, to be released!” says author, doctor, self-taught chef and blogger Nandita Iyer.
Simultaneously, she’s trying to ride the heat wave by staying indoors and hydrated since she’s at her worst in summers.
“This has been the harshest summer in Bengaluru and most of my kitchen garden is barely surviving the heat. I’m doing what I can to keep the plants alive and also getting back to my daily morning riyaz, something I could not do when these morning hours were occupied with writing and editing!” she shares.
Nandita has written the immensely popular Everyday Superfoods and The Everyday Healthy Vegetarian. Her new book also isn’t unrelated to food. The first chapter is on baking (including sourdough), and the next chapters are on spices and fermentation. Then there’s a chapter on homemade beauty that’s all about making hair and skin-care products which mostly use ingredients from the kitchen and some additional herbs.
“I usually end up making my soaps in the kitchen as this is where the oils and additives, kitchen scales and the hob are. In fact, I like to say that I cook my soaps. Kitchen gardening is integral to my cooking. Then, in fibre arts, I use kitchen waste such as avocado peels and stone, pomegranate peels, flowers from the previous day’s puja etc to prepare natural dyes. Crochet is probably the only thing that is not directly related to food or cooking, but crochet creations make for delightful additions in terms of functionality and aesthetics in a kitchen. So, I don’t feel like I’ve deviated at all, just expanded on the cooking part!” she explains.
Jill of all trades
Nandita, 45, started writing This Handmade Life in March 2021 and the introductory chapter is her favourite, where she’s penned her personal stories for the very first time. “It includes a lot of childhood incidents, which I believe led me into becoming the maker I am today. It felt magical how many of the long-forgotten trivial scenes from my past came to me while I was working on the introduction,” she reflects.
The introduction was also the toughest to write as Nandita aimed to strike the right balance between personal and too personal. “The other chapters were relatively easier as they were mostly about the things I practice in my everyday life,” she adds.
This Handmade Life is unique in that a lot of times, says Nandita, we restrict ourselves from getting into things because of the pressure of perfection or the need to be an expert.
“Being a Jill of all trades is somehow looked upon as a negative thing. My book is meant to convey that it is fine to know a little bit of many life skills, like making one good cake, one basic loaf of bread, one kickass hot sauce, a couple of crochet stitches, making your own compost, making one bath soap you can use every day,” says Nandita. “The combination of all these things makes one powerfully self-sufficient and closer to a sustainable life. Our hands, which are capable of a range of fine and gross motor skills, are reduced today to just tapping on our phones all day long as our lives are all about screens. From buying provisions to making payments to tracking activity to allowing guests at the gate, it is all done via our phones, which are a major source of distraction and anxiety. Keeping our hands busy with creative work is the best way to break the habit of constantly picking up our phones and therefore to slow down and turn towards mindfulness without putting in any extra effort of trying to meditate or pursue slow living.”
Independence movement
The idea for the book occurred to Nandita after the first lockdown, when almost everyone she knew was either baking or making café-style coffee (read Dalgona) or tinkering around with a sourdough starter or fermenting their own jar of hot sauce. Her friends often joked, saying: ‘You grow your own vegetables, make your own bread, cook your own soap, brew your own kombucha, we wonder what’s next?’
“Through This Handmade Life, I wanted to inspire my readers to take baby steps towards creating the stuff we need in our everyday lives, be more atmanirbhar (independent) for our daily needs, experience the joy that creating brings more than mindlessly consuming,” Nandita muses.
Her process of writing this book was to first outline the chapters she wanted to write and then switch between them to complete them. “Each chapter is like a book unto itself, so I could move between the chapters whenever I felt saturated from writing on one topic,” says Nandita. “And then came the task of finding the right projects or recipes. Some were absolutely simple to start off with, some a little more challenging and so on. This involved trying out each of these projects in my kitchen or using my existing tried and tested recipes. The final task was to interview experts in each of these subjects, to add some expert perspectives as well as a dose of inspiration for the readers.”
Nandita usually wakes up early to tick off essential writing for the day. In her early writing days, she’d agonise over every line and progress would be slow. “But over the last couple of years, I’ve written whatever comes to my mind for the first draft because that is what the first draft is supposed to be,” she says. “Sometimes, I would record voice notes on my phone while walking in the mornings and then write those down for the book over the next couple of days.”
She has another book coming up this year on seasonal vegetarian recipes. After that, she wants to focus on classical music.
“I am planning something exciting in this space along with a friend, but it’s too early to share more. A podcast has been on my mind for a few years now, too. Meanwhile, I am going to focus on regularly sending out my newsletter and uploading healthy cooking videos on my YouTube channel,” she says.
From HT Brunch, June 4, 2022
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