For some, cooking is a necessary evil to get ingredients from the fridge into one’s mouth.
For the mother-son duo Purnima Dubey and Akshay Deora, cooking is an opportunity to spend time with family and share their favorite flavors with the community.
Although he had volunteered at the food pantry since his freshman year, Deora says Eileen Pewitt, cooking education coordinator for Healthy New Albany, helped him put a twist on his service requirement.
Eventually, Deora says, Pewitt asked him and his mother to put on a cooking class at the Philip Heit Center for Healthy New Albany as a part of Healthy New Albany’s multicultural cooking program.
Credits to Carol McCarrick
“I had been … using ingredients that are available at the pantry and then creating recipes that pantry clients can then use with those ingredients,” Deora says. “The culmination of that was cooking at the Heit Center, where my mom and I cooked home-style Indian food for the class.”
Dubey says the program at the Heit Center gives the New Albany community a way to learn about cultures they may not be frequently exposed to, despite the fact that there is a substantial Indian population in New Albany.
“One of the things that these types of classes contribute is promoting the diversity within New Albany and finding a way for people from different backgrounds to connect with the community as a whole,” Dubey says. “There are quite a few Indians in New Albany and they are very active members of the community, but food is a way for people of all backgrounds to connect over something common because everybody has to eat.”
Part of connecting with the New Albany community meant making participants in the class feel as though the recipes being taught were accessible to them, which was part of the reason Dubey and Deora decided to recreate home-style cooking as opposed to more elaborate dishes.
“So the title of the class that we gave out to the people before they came was ‘Indian Home Cooking,’” Deora says. “We wanted to push that the food that we made – we made a couple of dishes – were truly home cooking for a lot of Indians.”
Tess Wells is an editorial assistant. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
Kadai Paneer (skillet cooked cheese with onions, peppers and tomatoes)
Ingredients (yields about 15 servings)
- 16 oz. fresh paneer
- 4 large green bell peppers
- 2 large red bell peppers
- 4 fresh Roma tomatoes
- 13 oz. can crushed tomatoes
- 3 tbsp. vegetable or canola oil
- 1 ½ large yellow onion
- 2-4 cloves of garlic, to taste
- 3 tsp. salt
- 1 tsp. turmeric
- 1 tsp. coriander powder
- 1 tsp. methi seeds
- ½ tsp. kalonji
- 1 tsp. cinnamon powder
- 1 tsp. cumin powder
- ¼ heavy cream (optional)
Directions
- Chop onions and peppers into ½-inch chunks.
- Cut paneer into ½-inch pieces and bake at 350 degrees on a greased cookie sheet until paneer is lightly browned but still soft.
- Meanwhile, add oil to a stockpot and heat on medium heat for 1-2 minutes until oil is simmering.
- Add onions and coarsely chopped garlic and sauté until onions are translucent and garlic is fragrant.
- Add methi, kalonji, turmeric and coriander and fry for 1 minute.
- Add peppers and sauté on medium-high heat for 10-15 minutes, stirring every few minutes until peppers are soft.
- Add fresh tomatoes and cook for 3-5 minutes.
- Add browned paneer and salt, stir, and then add crushed tomatoes.
- Cook for additional 5-10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until vegetables reach desired softness and a thick gravy forms. This is called a sabzi.
- Add cinnamon powder and cumin powder and stir to combine.
- Add heavy cream (if using). Turn off heat and rest sabzi for 5-10 min.
- Serve warm with roti.
