Out & About Spring 2019

A Pinch of Spice What do you do when your friends and neighbours keep asking how to make certain dishes? You create a cookbook of course, which is precisely what Balwinder Kapila has done and GERALDINE GARDNER visited her in her kitchen to find out more – and try a bit of delicious homemade spicy dahl FOOD & DRINK

B alwinder Kapila loves to cook, particularly the recipes passed down to her by her mother and grandmother, along with dishes she has adapted to suit Western culture. Balwinder’s parents moved to England in the late 50s and she was born in Hounslow, in the house where her 90-year-old mother still lives. “Growing up I would watch my mother and aunties as they gathered in the kitchen and created all these amazing dishes and I learnt a lot from them. “In the early days we used to get certain ingredients delivered, but now you can buy almost anything in the supermarkets as different cultures have been embraced.” Balwinder cooks very much by instinct, knowing just how much spice she wants to use or whether or not to add one chilli or two. “I don’t really measure ingredients out, but for this book I had to. “It all started when friends would come round and sit and chat and make notes while I cooked.”

Her neighbours would come to Balwinder’s Pangbourne home and needed to know exactly how much to add and when, so she worked it out as she went along and they would happily go away and recreate her mouthwatering dishes. “They would invite me around to their house to mark their efforts out of 10 – we always had such fun.” From this, it became obvious that a book should follow, but Balwinder never imagined it would take eight years to complete. It was worth the wait, as A Pinch of Spice is indeed a thing of beauty and a labour of love. “I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into that book, but did I ever regret embarking on the project? No, not once and thats really because of the support and encouragement from my friends and family. It was a real community effort.” Balwinder is not exaggerating when she says this. Although she prepared

“Growing up I would watch my mother and aunties as they gathered in the kitchen and created all these amazing dishes and I learnt a lot from them.”

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