The kitchen doctor

Shikha Sharma is a dietician who can cook as well as she looks.

Can someone who urges you to go on a diet be a foodie? Well, Shikha Sharma, nutritionist, weight-loss diva to not just the well-endowed but also beauty queens of late, qualifies and not just because of her preoccupation with calorie crunching. Sharma has a full-fledged kitchen with a creative chef (borrowed from The Park hotel) who thinks up ways and recipes to make boring health food delicious on a daily basis.

The meals he thus creates are served up as part of a buffet at Sharma's various clinics throughout Delhi. Every evening, without fail, the fully-trained doctor herself partakes of the "feast"; a tofu (!) souffle one day "" "that really comes out very well" "" not-so-fattening rajma kebabs the next. But even these gourmet forays are not the reason why she is a foodie.

She is, well, because, as she affirms, " I like food," and confirms,"Yes, I would like to do something with food in the future too." Meaning, maybe another cookbook (she already has one to her name), another cookery show (she holds the NDTV one responsible for promoting her interest in food), a restaurant? We all do live in hope, don't we?

When she was 14, Sharma aspired to make gobhi. The cauliflower was turning out quite well, until she decided to spice it up some more "since I love spicy food". The enterprising teen then decided to take some leftover pickle masala and pour it all into the veggie resulting in fumes that seriously threatened to asphyxiate the household. "My sister who was in the other room came out and asked whether I was trying to kill them all, and my mother banned me from the kitchen after that."

But obviously some food-connected ambitions remained. As an overweight medical graduate ("all we did was sit and study and then eat chips and biscuits in whatever spare time we got") interning in the cardiology department of a government hospital, Sharma was appalled at the number of patients coming in without a clue about dietary restraint.

"We used to get a lot of people from old Delhi and they just thought the parcha that the nutritionist gave them was to be followed till they were on medication and then they could go back to their unhealthy lifestyles. People were dying because of wrong eating and no one really cared." This, Sharma says, prompted her to abandon higher studies in medicine and take up nutrition instead.

Today, of course, she doles out plenty of advice and tips but does she follow them herself? Ask her about her daily meals, and they are not particularly exciting even if they are totally correct "" a bowl of fruit and milkless tea in the morning, a roti (made from a mix of barley, oatmeal, wheat attas) and veggies for lunch, a snack from the clinic's spread, a glass of veggie juice in summers, and another roti with veggies for dinner.

Restaurants are rare "" at the most once a week even though Sharma loves Thai food "despite the coconut milk... I like vegetables that are lightly done, nothing squishy." But there are Kashmiri meals at home. "My mother was a Kashmiri so we grew up on that."

So even today, you'll probably find haak and yakhni and even dum aloo on the table. And then there are days when she will make a pulao or saute some veggies. She offers to stir-fry some veggies for this space. We refuse and ask for some more interesting, healthy food instead.

FAVOURITE RECIPE

Stuffed oat rolls with spinach and cottage cheese

Serves four
Cooking time 25 min

For the batter
3 cups of oatmeal
2 tsp egg white (optional)
1 tsp olive oil
Water as required for the batter
1/4 tsp artificial sweetner like Zero or Splendor

For the filling
3 cups spinach, chopped
100 gm grated paneer
2 tsp garlic, finely chopped
1 tsp onion, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
1/4 tsp nutmeg powder