FOOD Nisha Katona Nisha Katona: “I’m teaching people the neural pathways of an Indian grandmoth - er” By Ella Walker, PA If you’ve ever picked up one of Nisha Katona’s cookbooks, or seen her on Great British Menu, you’ll know she’s super glam and super sharp.What you don’t imagine is the businesswoman, Mowgli Street Food empire founder and former child protection barrister assessing alpaca poo. “I judge animals on the size of their poo, and alpaca poo is very manageable,” says the 53-year-old with a laugh, and she means it.When deciding whether to buy her three alpacas, she remembers:“I just stood and watched them go to the toilet for about an hour and thought,‘How tough is that to clean?’” The British Indian chef is as passionate about her animals as she is about teaching people “humble cooking, the stuff you throw together with what’s dying in the fridge, what’s rotting in the veg rack and what’s in the freezer.” Her new ITV1 show, Nisha Katona’s Home Kitchen, combines the two in what she calls a “preposterous privilege”. The series gives us a glimpse into the Wirral-based chef’s farm, where she whips up chicken Dhansak and dahl in her outdoor kitchen, and those cuddly alpacas roam, joined by four horses, two tiny dogs (one is sat beside her during our Zoom chat), guinea fowl, chickens and ducks (“We hatch them from eggs, raise them and they come in the house and hand feed”), and potentially in the future, a miniature donkey, poo dependent. And don’t worry, you can become emotionally attached to her animals; they are absolutely not on the menu.“I don’t even eat the eggs my chickens give,” says Katona.“Every single night I go out and just stand with the animals, sit with the goats or the alpacas.They are honestly part of my family. I couldn’t eat them, I love them.” The series kicks off boldly, focussing on one of the most unassuming of ingredients that many of us deliberately avoid: lentils.To Katona, they’re a delicious kind of magic and “the cornerstone of Indian cooking”.“Lentils are possibly the cheapest and most delicious thing you can eat,” she says.“Showing people how you can create a million flavours in 15 minutes with these dried things in your cupboard, literally, that’s alchemy.” Episode one is also packed with tips: swap coriander for lemon zest if someone hates it, freeze ice cube trays of blitzed garlic and ginger to save time, slosh your dahl back into the pan you tempered your spices in “because we literally don’t want to waste one seed”. This is pure Katona, trying to up-skill us in every moment.“I don’t want people to just blindly follow things. I want to give them the skills. It’s almost like teaching them the neural pathways of an Indian grandmother,” says Katona. “The more you can give people a story behind why something happens, they’re not then clinging to a recipe. I never want people to think,‘I’ve got to get the recipe book out,’ to do something. I want it to be in their memories and their stories, in their heads and their fingers.”
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