ANYBODY looking at my size will know I love to eat! I was always like this. Even when I was young and used to potter around the kitchen at home making Peanut Brittle! We�re Mangaloreans. At least I am. Charles is a Goan. I was born and brought up in Bombay, the sixth child in a family of eight. We had real good Mangalorean food at home. Lots of fish in coconut and lots of Mangalorean sweets for which I never cared. My father was a gourmet and he employed an excellent cook, because my mother was not fond of food and hardly ever stepped into the kitchen!

I remember going to Crawford Market with my father on Sundays and being fascinated by the piles of fish! I love markets. Whenever I travel, I have to go and visit the local market. I like the Victoria Market at Melbourne. It�s very spectacular. You can get every kind of Asian and English veggie there. Meats like beef, lamb, kangaroo and rabbit. And the seafood! Not just the quality, but even quantity. So much for such a small population. It�s a very clean market. I also like the Helsinki and Stuttgart markets.

I thought Crawford Market was extremely well designed even before I married Charles and discovered his world of architecture. It had sections for fish, mutton, beef, fruit, flowers, the big main centre for vegetables, and on the side, livestock and geese, which we bought during Christmas, a samoosawalla and fresh eggs for sale outside. It was a complete world. You got everything under one roof. The day they moved the fish market out of there, marked the beginning of the end of Crawford Market.

Now I go to the Grant Road Market every Sunday. That�s the best day for seafood. What excellent oysters, clams, crab, shark, pomfret, bangada you get there. I like the big black pomfret, the halwa, it�s a nice fleshy fish. It can withstand the red Rechade Goan masala I use so much very easily. While the white pomfret, which is more delicate, cannot. The halwa also has a nice presence on the dining table.

Talking about tables, ours is square. Charles wanted and designed it this way. It allows for great sit-down dinners and discussions. We like having people over for dinner. On a round table, Charles feels, everybody is sitting too close to each other. This square one gives us space. It�s an informal set-up over which we get to know our dinner guests. We like eating out at restaurants too, but it�s not the same as having a dinner at home. We can�t shout at each other and argue!

I started cooking seriously in 1962 after we got married. We moved to the US, to Boston actually, because Charles was a visiting professor at MIT. We spent four months there and it was an exciting time. I learnt to cook and weave during this period. In the beginning, it was Charles who did the cooking. He could do a steak and a terrific cheese omelette in which he put in everything that was edible, including guava, chocolate and jam! Now on the rare occasion when he makes an omelette, the stuffing is yesterday�s uneaten dinner! He used to say, �The trick in making a good omelette is not to turn it over. So the top remains semi-cooked and is not dry.� He�d then fold it over and slip it off the pan. This is not like the Irani double-fry omelette! But Charles never cooks nowadays! I started off in Boston when people used to come over to our rented apartment and ask for an Indian meal. In 1962, it was not easy to get Indian ingredients in American markets. Now you get everything including the best Basmati and you have men frying jelebis and samoosas in department stores and supermarkets. I started cooking whenever we had people over. I didn�t waste time cooking otherwise, the US was such an exciting place and there was so much to see and do. We used to indulge in TV dinners and we saw 58 movies in four months! We had no dishwasher so we used to pile the dirty dishes in the sink until there were no more clean dishes left to use! Then we�d wash them. Charles used to do the washing up. He was the official dishwasher in the first year of our marriage! Now, 41 years later, I am head cook and dish and bottlewasher!

The TV dinners were fun. My repertoire was limited to chicken curry and rice, bhindi and chole. No Mangalorean food. There was no coconut in Boston. Now you can get coconut milk in cans! But I had taken sets of thalis and whatever ordinary Indian meals I prepared, used to look very exotic in the thalis. Even today, I think visual appeal of food is very important. Our friends are all architects, designers, artists, writers, journalists, film-makers, all creative people, and I am as conscious how the food looks on the plates as how it tastes. Everybody can cook well, but the food must also be a visual delight!

When we have friends over now, my meals are mainly seafood. I make a bouillabaisse, a soupy stew really, in which I thrown in lots of seafood. Or a spicy Tom Yum soup with red mirchi powder, limbu, noodles and without or without coconut milk. Sometimes I make a paella, again, with lots of seafood, chicken, olives and mushrooms. It�s so close to the Indian pulao, it�s even got saffron. I can make a good seafood pasta with crab, shrimp, oyster, squid, clams, I wish I could use mussels, but the mussels here are so muddy I get scared. I like choosing the seafood myself. It�s fresh and never frozen. The meat I get from Cafe Ridge. They also do a good smoked ham, and lamb, veal, pork chops. The exotic veggies like the red and yellow peppers, I pick up from Trikaya Farms at Crawford Market.

I learnt my cooking out of cookery books, mainly, and by eating at different places and talking to people. But I also have an Andhra cook at home whom I have trained and who is really very good. I keep my menus simple. I like one-dish meals. Soup, paella, pasta, or a fish with Rechade masala, a salad with pomelo, prunes, dried cranberries, spring onions, olive oil, soya sauce, brown sugar and ginger. The meal should be sharp, sweet, bland and spicy! I go with tastes and textures and I like a balance of tastes. I do all kinds of desserts as well. Chocolate lush, crepes with orange sauce, cake with sutar-feni and ice-cream in rose syrup. Now we are calorie conscious and have started easing up on heavy and rich foods. Mangalorean red hot prawn curries are to dream of now! We look for quick tastes, dishes that can be made easily.

Charles will eat everything when we go out for dinner, but at home, he eats very simply. He likes rice with his soup. I prefer noodles or macaroni or pasta. He�s disinterested in cooking. Our son and daughter, Nakul and Nandita, are very good cooks. Charles says that a person has to be greedy and really like food and be able to eat a lot, to cook well! He believes a cook�s tastebuds need to be motivated. And that people who are great cooks have a great sensitivity to taste. He doesn�t have that! Though Charles has a taste for good food. What he means is that he won�t be able to identify the ingredients in a dish or distinguish between their tastes.

Charles has a sense of balance for tastes and textures of food that is instinctive. And he gets upset when people go to say a Chinese restaurant, order six dishes and share them! The Chinese don�t eat that way, he complains.

They eat their meals in courses. From Singapore to Beijing, Charles will say, the Chinese eat their courses consecutively. Only in India, everything from prawn to chicken is piled onto the plate in a hotchpotch! We are greedy, we will take everything. And we are stupid, we don�t even know what we are eating. We even do that with the desserts! Charles firmly believes that the business of distinguishing between a good dish and a good meal is very important. But for him, a good dish is also Bade Miya�s baida roti eaten off the road. Or the bhel-puri at Chowpatty. He finds it incredible that such flavours, textures and balance in a dish can be brought out by such simple ingredients. Charles often tells me, �Why can�t you make nourishing food for lunch and dinner taste like bhel-puri!�

Click for recipe