One delicious play

FOODIE

Theatreperson M K Raina wins rave reviews for his kitchen act.

Armed with four golden rules of cooking, M K Raina successfully conquered the kitchen a long time ago. "You can either boil/roast/fry," he begins. Food can either be hot or cold, he adds.

"Then comes colour. And finally, flavour," he finishes and it seems like the meal is ready. But we've just started and going Kashmiri all the way. On the menu is dum aloo, shalgam (turnip) and spinach-nadru. Bustling around the kitchen, Raina points to his collection of spices that really makes all the difference in the taste.

His eagerness to cook is so palpable that it's hard to imagine he started cooking out of necessity. "My mother used to make great Kashmiri dishes and I never cooked. After I started living alone, one day I got fish home.

I wondered, what do I do with it? What would my mother do with it? Well, I just got up and fried it," he recounts. Since then there have been many disasters in the kitchen, but practice does make perfect after all. The key to good cooking lies in using the right kind of spices he tells us.

Taking theatre across the country, from Manipur to Kashmir, Raina's sense of decoding food has developed over time and many cultures.

"For me, a community's cuisine, handicrafts and farm implements are indicative of how developed it actually is." And in that department, Manipur has won him over completely, be it with lovely fish preparations, refreshing music or sophisticated farm implements.

Over the last three months, in the interiors of Jharkhand and Bihar, Raina has been busy shooting a film centred on each of 13 women protagonists. And amidst these great stories, Raina also discovered the delightful bamboo chutney there that he ate to his heart's content, for "two straight days".

Being married to a Bengali has added a tangy flavour to the maach he also prepares, and food at the Raina home is a refreshing variety of flavours and spices. Colour too delights him.

"In Kashmiri cooking, there's a lot of yellow. But there's also green and a delightful red," he says. His recent stay in Kashmir probably lent some more colour to his cooking. Raina spent a month and a half trying to keep alive a Kashmiri folk theatre form called Bhand Pather. He trained 35 boys who have strayed away from their family tradition of following the art.

Cooking, Raina finds, is one of the most relaxing activities, as also is family time. "Our dining table is the parliament of the house. It's compulsory for the four of us to sit around everyday for a few hours of adda," he says.

Though he loves his meat, Raina had to learn to cook vegetarian food when his daughter turned veg. If today's menu is representative of Raina's kitchen, and if Raina's kitchen is something of a stage, it's one delicious play.

---

FAVOURITE RECIPES

KASHMIRI DUM ALOO

1/2 kg medium-sized potatoes
3 tsp red chilli powder
1-2 tsp saunf powder
1 tsp ginger powder
A few pieces of cardamom
A few pieces of clove

Boil potatoes and fry in mustard oil. Add a little water so that the potatoes crack. Pierce potatoes with a toothpick. In a pan, put the potatoes in mustard oil and add a little water to it. Add chilli powder, saunf powder, ginger powder and stir on low heat. Grind cardamom and add to potatoes. Add cloves. Keep the gravy thick.

SHALGAM (TURNIP)
1/2 kg shalgam
2-3 pieces of Kashmiri vadi
1 tsp garam masala
3-4 red chillies
Salt to taste

After cleaning, slice shalgam into thin pieces. Light fry in mustard oil. Sprinkle it with a little water. Add salt and cook on low heat. Add Kashmiri vadi, garam masala and red chillies. Cook till shalgam goes soft.

SPINACH-NADRU (LOTUS STEM)
250 gm nadru
1 bunch of spinach
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp ginger powder
Salt to taste

Fry nadru and cut into small pieces. Put washed and cut spinach in a pan separately. Add salt to taste, chilli powder and ginger powder to the spinach. Once spinach is cooked, add fried nadru to the pan and mix.