Radio Finely Chopped by Kalyan Karmakar

Pallavi Amberkar is a Mumbai girl whose roots lie in Malvan in coastal Maharashtra. She opted out of working when her son was born, but her desire to work was always there. She came across the concept of home cook organised home dining experiences through Authenticook, tried it out, and loved the experience. She cooked Malvani food as it was cooked in her home, and the audience lapped up her food....

Jasleen Marwah is a media professional turned home chef who launched her Kashmiri food offering, Namak, during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Namak exists primarily as a catering offer now. Something new has happened in Jasleen's life. She is now the co-owner cum chef of a restaurant called Folk in Mumbai's art district of Kalaghoda. Folk offers pan Indian food and not just Kashmiri food. In her s...

Ushri Guruji's love for cooking started at the age of 10. She lived in Kolkata then. Her inspiration was chef Sanjeev Kapoor's show Khana Khazana. She moved to Mumbai, married into a Bohri family, and has been in the corporate world for 17 years. Her love for feeding people inspired her to start her home chef business, Ushri HomeChef, 4 years back during the Covid 19 lockdown. She offers b...

She was referred to as the 'salad queen' before salads became a thing. She hosted a food and travel show before they food and travel shows became a thinfg. She came up with a farmer's market before farmers became a thing. Watch Karen Anand in this episode of #foodocracyforher to find out what drives this force of nature.

Makhanas are trending in the Indian dietary world these days but do you know what they are? How they are grown? How they are processed? If not, then this podcast episode featuring Pratibha Bondia Kheria of Pearl Mithila Makhana...and organic and ethically driven enterprise...will give you the answers that you are looking for. Along with the inspiring story of this socially conscious entrepreneur.&...

Reshma and Annu are two sisters who grew up in a small town near Kochi in Kerala. Reshma went to Mumbai for her studies and to work. Annu went to Chennai to study and now works out of Bangalore. The two sisters are part of India's tech boom, having worked in the intersection of bio-tech and radiology and in AI.  The lockdown and going back home and seeing the power of the cooking of their amm...

Annie Bafna is a CA as many of her fellow Parsis are. What makes her rare in the community is that she is a vegetarian! She used to eat eggs once but has given that up apart from when she needs to do tastings at The Nutcracker Mumbai which has an egg-etarian menu. Like any good Parsi, Annie reveres eggs. This ensures that the scrambled eggs coming out of her kitchen are consistently creamy and dre...

Nandini Deb grew up in Sovabazar, Kolkata, in a family obsessed with food. And music. Sounds like the average Bengali family? Well her family ran a restaurant and her grandmother was the first thumri singer in Kolkata. Nandini left Kolkata for Mumbai as she wanted to be a background singer. She has done many stage gigs across the country and the world and has given her voice for a Hindi film. She...

My interview with chef Kartikeya Ratan is by far the longest Foodocracy For Her podcast interview that I have done till date. When you listen to the story of a child from a doctor's family who wanted to be a chef and subsequently went to India's top hospitality school, worked in one of the top hotel kitchens in India and then one of the most inventive ones, went abroad and worked in top rated rest...

Misbah Mitha has run a successful business as a fashion designer for 33 years. The pandemic was the first time where she sat with no work. A friend and neighbour, who was well aware of her cooking skills, bumped into her during his walk one evening. He suggested that she become a home chef as that was the need of the hour. Her husband, a retired banker, was sceptical at first. That made Misbah eve...

Keertida Phadke is a Pune girl who spent the formative years of her life in Tokyo before she moved to Pune with her parents. She went to Paris to study business management, joined L'Oreal and came back to India with them. This time to Mumbai. Her love for food made her quit and move to NYC to study to be a chef at the Natural Gourmet Institute. To know how from there she became the co-founder of E...

The world of Indian food became poorer on the 21st of July 2022 with the passing away of Pia Promina Dasgupta Barve in Mumbai.  There was a spontaneous outpouring of grief from the many lives she had touched. To know about the multifaceted life she led, do read this article by food researcher Pritha Sen...https://tinyurl.com/4eeevr7t  Many call Pia the pioneer home chef. She was baking f...

Mumbai born Shital Kakad of Shital's Food Cottage loved food ever since she was a child. This soon translated into a love for feeding. Her initial enthusiasm was around what one could call 'world cuisine'...pizza, pasta, cakes... turning any dish that her husband liked during their travels into a vegetarian one once back home, was her super power. She then came across the world of food bloggers an...

Her home town of Mumbai was like a new city for her when chef Sanjana Patel moved back to India from France and opened a patisserie here. This was 9 years back when the city had just begun to wake up to modern patisserie trends. She opened La Folie in Fort from where she did largely chocolate based confectionery. It was with her outlet in Bandra, La Folie Lab, that she began introducing the city t...

The inaugural episode of #foodocracyforher features Pinky Chandan Dixit of Soam. She tells the story behind her setting up the restaurant which keeps winning hearts with its soulful Gujarati vegetarian food and how she tackled the pandemic months. This episode aired on 21st May 2020 as an Instagram live and Pinky and Soam have gone from strength to strength since then.

#foodocracyforher is back after a break and we have got a most wonderful episode for you. Y You will get to hear Devika Kotihaskar Khadapkar talk about Kokan Bazar which turned 14 on 9th July 2022. Kokan Bazar was founded by her mother in law, Nayan Khadapkar, who is an alumni of TISS and has been involved in social work through her career. Her aim was to generate sustainable employment for the wo...

Chef Sachiko Seth, who is of Tibetan origin, was born in Kalimpong in the hills of Bengal. Her mother Doma Wang (pronounced Wong) had started a home chef enterprise in Kolkata back then. Making momos at home and selling them across Salt Lake. Sachiko, whose pet name is Puchu, remembers waking up as a 4 year old to the sight of her mum and her team making momos, thukpa and chowmein in their house f...

There was once a little girl in Mumbai who would go to school every day and fret over the three R's ... reading, writing and 'rithmetic. She was dyslexic and these shibboleths of the conventional education system just didn't talk to her. She would come home feeling frustrated, sit in the kitchen and see her mother (a Gujarati) and paternal grand-mom (an Andhra'ite) cook for the family. This was he...

Once upon a time, there was a Marwari girl from Kolkata who grew up in a family with no food restrictions. She went to Singapore to study film making after her school finals. Cooked for her friends there. Realised that she enjoyed cooking more than she enjoyed making films. Still in her teens, she went off on a journey of self discovery by attending a cooking course. She attained enlightenment the...

Prachi Agarwal Goel is the head chef and co-founder of Brownie Cottage, established in 2005. In the first episode of the podcast she spoke about how her summer holiday trips to Mumbai from Allahabad as a child got her interested in the world of baking. Of how she did a bakery course at the Sophia Polytechnic after her graduation at Allahabad as the love of her life and her future life partner had...

Prachi Agarwal Goel is the head chef and co-founder of Brownie Cottage, established in 2005. Setting up a food business was never the life plan of this academic topper from Allahabad who grew up in a conservative Marwari joint family. It was her love for baking and her future husband and co-founder of Brownie Cottage, Raghav Goel's, massive sweet tooth which led her to do a course on baking at Mum...

"We didn't talk about food. I read up on my notes on the food bits for you,' exclaimed the indomitable Bachi Karkaria at the end of my interview of her on her latest book, Capture The Dream. Her biography of the late Captain C.P. Krishnan Nair, the founder of the Leela Group. Truth be told, this very readable book left me with so much food for thought that I forgot to ask Bachi about the role the...

The story of a cat called Maharani. An outside cat. Who became an inside outside cat. And now is an inside cat named Baby Loaf, lying beside me on the bed while I type this. Things might change the moment the bell rings though as he would make a dash to run out of our apartment which has been his too for more than 2 years now. I do hope you liked this episode and do share it. #cat #catperson #catl...

The story of a cat named Mau and of how he brought a bunch of us together through his search for his forever home. While I am yet to meet him in person, Mao is special as he is the first kitten whom I helped find a house for. After opening our own home to two. All the people mentioned in the podcasts have themselves adopted community cats and feed and look after many more. #TheTailsOfMyLife is my...

In this episode on my podcast on the cats in my life, which will hopefully someday become a book, I tell you the story of a cat whom I named Maharani who met me in our building lobby and made me fall in love with cats. I narrated the episode while our cats Baby Loaf and little Nimki sat by me on the bed before they went off to sleep. Was it really so boring? What happened to Maharani? Tune in the...