Make-up artist Vidya Tikari fancies exotic seafood in the kitchen.
Beauty expert and make-up artist Vidya Tikari’s new studio, having opened recently, is already bustling with clients. What’s more, she tells us that her new concept of “SPArty” is getting fairly popular too. For someone who has two decades of experience and has worked with a number of well-known faces, including the likes of Aishwarya Rai, Sushmita Sen, Bipasha Basu and Deepika Padukone, Tikari is now in the business of organising spa parties. “We arrange for the food, hot stone therapy treatments, shoulder and neck massages, dry manicures, reflexology treatments. The focus,” she adds, “is on spa parties, which I feel is the next big trend.”
Her salon looks inviting and we find her adorable 13-month-old daughter toddling towards us. Tikari tells us about her five-year-old son, who is, surprisingly at such a young age, very particular about his share of Body Shop lip balms, hair gels, lotions, sunscreens, creams and soaps. “He’s really, really finicky,” she laughs, leading us to a small area in the salon that doubles up as a kitchen where Tikari likes to “toss salads and cook food which has a high health quotient”.
For someone who lived her life away from India, growing up in Australia, Tikari says that she loved dabbling with makeup as a kid. “My aunts used to give me all their used makeup and I used to experiment a lot on animals and pets.” What? “Yes, in Australia you hardly find human beings, so I used to apply make-up on my cat,” she quips.
Though Indian food was prepared at home, Tikari’s own taste buds veered towards Japanese and Thai preparations. “I cannot bear to change the texture of vegetables. That’s a reason why Indian cooking with oil and spices doesn’t go well with me,” she says. She prefers healthy bites with stir-fried veggies. “Food tastes best when it doesn’t lose its original flavour. That way, it remains healthy too,” she explains.
It’s the sort of food that she serves even at her SPArties, by the way. Teriyaki chicken, steamed fish in light soya sauce (the recipe of which she shares with us), grilled veggies on a bed of lettuce, and her special salad of fresh vegetables drizzled with vinigrette dressing with a squeeze of lemon, white pepper, freshly ground black pepper, chopped ginger, olive oil and roughly chopped garlic. “The entire emphasis is on giving clients a healthy experience.”
She prepares two recipes for us, including her favourite Burmese khawswe. Her ultimate food experience, she says, is when her family meets once a year in Goa and her sister-in-law teaches her new and innovative recipes in the kitchen of their holiday home there. “Octopus on a bed of iceberg lettuce, lots of seafood, including squid, lobster, crab, fresh catch that is either steamed or grilled. That’s the ultimate food experience for me,” says Tikari. Her childhood memories of food include fish wrapped in banana leaves with just a hint of salt and buried as a parcel in sand topped with hot coals. “That’s what I call the real flavour,” she says. For Tikari, it is what is real that’s always in.
FAVOURITE RECIPE
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STEAMED FISH IN SOYA SAUCE
2 spring onions
2 tbsp ginger juliennes
4-5 pods of garlic,
crushed roughly
½ cup mushrooms,
chopped finely
2 tbsp soya/oyster sauce
1 chicken cube
½ cup water
½ tsp cornflour powder
4-5 pieces boneless fish (preferably sole)
3 tbsp olive oil
Salt, pepper to taste
Red chilli powder (optional)
In a pan, heat olive oil and add chopped spring onion, ginger juliennes and crushed garlic. Once the onion is translucent, add chilli powder, finely chopped mushroom and stir fry. Add water to which cornflour powder has already been stirred. Make sure there aren’t any lumps. Break the chicken cube and stir gently. Add salt and mix in soya sauce/you could add oyster sauce too. Let the sauce thicken. Sprinkle fresh black pepper powder.
In a banana leaf, take pieces of sole and arrange neatly. Pour the sauce over the sole and after wrapping the leaf, put in the steamer for another eight to 10 minutes. Serve hot with an array of accompaniments including chopped green chillies, freshly squeezed lime juice and noodles or steamed rice.