Feeding Fussy Eaters

Cordon bleu-trained chef Rakhee Vaswani, who has taught the basics of cooking to many, turns author with her book on helping children enjoy food.

If Yan can cook, so can you,” squeals chef Rakhee Vaswani, using her hands to imitate Chinese born, Hong Kong American chef and food writer Martin Yan’s signature knife skills. Recalling the hugely popular show that aired in India in the 1990s, a time when Sanjeev Kapoor and Tarla Dalal were among the select few Indian food personalities on television, Mumbai-based Vaswani talks about how obsessed she was with watching these food shows even as a child.

Hungry to learn different styles of cooking and constantly experimenting with food, she’d shadow her mother and her aunts in the kitchen. “I’d learn how to make koftas (meatballs) from one, hakka noodles from another, and then come home and test the recipes,” she recalls. By the time she was 13, she was already preparing meals for her family. “Every time my mother cooked us a meal, I’d try and dress it up somehow. She’d complain bitterly about how I didn’t like her cooking,” she says.

MEALTIME BATTLES

Admittedly picky about food, Vaswani confesses she had to be bribed by her father to have her daily dose of carrot juice. Perhaps not quite as fussy as she was then, Vaswani still believes it is important that food looks as appealing as it tastes. Her teenage children, one a budding chef-in-training at the Culinary Institute of America, US, and the other a state-level swimmer, are just as particular. Having coped creatively with their fussy eating habits when they were younger, it is her trial and error solutions that led to her debut book Picky Eaters: And Other Meal-Time Battles published by Random House India and priced at `299.