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| Suneeta Vaswani |
Brave New Palate
by Molly O'Neill
A chef specializing in Indian cuisine takes on the problem of the picky eater in her own home.
Suneeta Vaswani has known a few picky eaters in her time. A chef, cooking instructor, and cookbook author who was raised in Bombay and has lived in Houston for 30 years, she has inspired near-strangers to sample Indian food but could not persuade her eldest son, Sanjay, to do the same. Although he was born in India, he spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Texas, and was such a picky eater that he barely touched the Indian foods she made.
Vaswani, 69, who has closely-cropped hair and almond-shaped eyes that give her a youthful and impish appearance, has shared her enthusiasm for Indian food with students since 1978. She has given thousands of her students confidence to experiment with once-exotic spices like curry, turmeric, garam marsala, and cumin. Still, despite his mother’s ability to gain Indian food converts, Sanjay remained a holdout.
“I would tell him, ‘Someday you will be cursed with children who are as picky eaters as you,” Vaswani says, “and I feel awful about that, because he has!”
Sanjay’s two teenage children are on strict, self-imposed diets: One eats hamburgers and pizza, the other, a vegetarian, eats string cheese and sweets. When Sanjay’s family visits, Vaswani makes elaborate meals rooted in the lessons she took at a Bombay cooking school she attended shortly after her marriage in 1958. But for her grandkids, there’s take-out and delivery.
Does she have any advice for other grandparents and parents faced with the problem of the picky eater?
“No, no advice,” she says with a laugh, “only blessings.”
Fortunately, there’s hope for the Vaswani grandchildren. An appreciation of Indian food is in their blood. By the time he graduated from college, Sanjay Vaswani came to love his mother’s food, and the grandkids’ own mother, Susan, is a passionate cook. Vaswani is of the philosophy that how we approach food — picky or not — is the result of nature, rather than nurture. Her other two grandchildren by her younger son, Dinesh, are prime examples: Ashwin, 14 years old, is as picky as his cousins, while Nandeeta, 11, has been hanging around kitchens since she was a little girl, wanting to learn and eat adventurously.
But that isn’t to say that Vaswani doesn’t believe in challenging children to try new things. Her grandchildren live far away — two are in San Francisco and two are in Bombay — and the distance prevents her from slowly introducing milder Indian foods to their palate. She hopes that someday, something will strike their taste buds. Barbecued chicken tandoori and sweet orange and saffron pudding are excellent introductions to Indian cooking. With enough exposure to foods like this, Vaswani believes her grandchildren might come around. But she admits she probably has a while to wait — their college graduations are still years away.
Continue to the recipes: Tandoori Chicken and Orange-Saffron Pudding
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