Meera Sodha

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2:59Hello and welcome to Table Manners. I'm Jessie Ware and I'm here with my mum in my kitchen. It is a beautiful autumn day. The parakeets are, I don't know, parakeeting? Parakeeting, yeah. Outside. It's a blue sky, but it was like three degrees this morning. So cold. Very cold. Well, now my kitchen is like a greenhouse. Yeah. And I have direct sunshine in my eyes, so it's lovely. It's lovely. Okay. Um, I've been on cooking duty. Oh, you've excelled yourself, darling. I don't know if I have. I think you have. We have a vegetarian on who probably has one of the leading vegan... Is it still only vegan?

3:38She's such a good vegetarian cook. She writes in The Guardian. Yes, but, like, her whole thing was that she has a vegan column. Yeah, it's his vegan. Um, Mira Soda's coming on the podcast. My brother cooks Mira Soda recipes the whole time. Yeah. salsa verde beans oh yeah that's Mira and we've got her coming on to talk about her new cookbook dinner which is 120 recipes of vegan and vegetarian food and um I'm cooking I'm on cooking duties so I you've prepped I've prepped like a prep queen the prep queen today I'm still waiting to put in the main event which I mean it could go one way or the other I have made if you've listened to the Jamie Dimitri episode I made a savoury galette and that was like a butternut squash and cider onion and cheddar cheese one I haven't done that but I've done some I remember it being quite nice so I've kind of improvised it's pumpkin season and so I've used one of the most delicious Natura Delisa pumpkins and I've roasted them and I pureed the pumpkin flesh because it has the green outside so that would have made it look really ugly and then I got pre-rolled short crust pastry which actually came in a circle which was brilliant as well thank you and so I've put the base as the pumpkin puree much like if you were doing a pizza like tomato to base and I've left a bit of space around the edge because what you do is you kind of create a crust by kind of folding into itself it's supposed to be very rustic my kind of cooking and then I've caramelized some red onions which I did with some sherry vinegar as well to kind of add a little and then goat's cheese and then I've got some hazelnuts that I've crushed up that I toasted and I fried some sage and I'm going to put them on near the end because otherwise they'll kind of burn and then i've done it with a herb salad um of tarragon chives dill parsley and then i've done um it's a sophie wybird recipe from mob so it's these harissa honey carrots and chickpeas that you do with whip feta so i've done that and then have you been whipping your feta yeah but it may it makes it sound like it's really hard it's such a great cheat isn't it but it looks very sexy and tastes great yeah and then for pudding I've done Ravneet Gills uh it's called Baking for Pleasure her cookbook and I did her brown sugar meringues I've never made meringues before in my life these are you feeling pretty I'm feeling so smug yeah I'm feeling like I could walk into an otolenghi and say hey i see your gigantic delicious meringues and i raise you yeah the rav meat gill brown sugar meringue and then the genius thing of this is that you do a kind of coffee cream so you just do some granulated instant coffee put some sugar in that with a bit of water and you pour that into a mascarpone and then you add a double cream and then you whip it and it's so banging it's like tiramisu it's delicious and then i've done some cherries frozen cherries with some sugar that you're going to put on top and then i'm going to grate some dark chocolate we were talking about black forest gatos last week and it's almost like a black forest gato meringue those tin cherries were not great the tin cherries were awful i recommend no one ever buying the tin cherries and always just go for the frozen cherries and then add some sugar so i think it should be quite nice i'm a bit worried i'm gonna have a soggy bottom amazing so yeah we've got uh mirror soda coming up to eat a delicious vegetarian lunch and to talk all things guardian column and dinner the cookbook

7:53Mira Soda, you've just joined us, not only with a beautiful bunch of flowers, a shabli, my fave, and also a honey cake, which is outrageous that you had the time to do that because I swear you're on the move at the moment and you're just so thoughtful. So cheers, thank you so much. Cheers. Thanks for having me. Yeah, cheers. I love to keep you coming. We're all drinking at lunchtime. I'm so happy. But it feels like late for me. Because we did morning breakfast radio this morning. Oh, did you? Oh, yeah. Okay, did you have to be up really early for that? Six. Unreal. I'm just not as good as I used to be at getting up early.

8:28Because you're a diva now. No, because I'm old. But, I mean, you must be up in the morning anyway because you have kids. How many kids do you have? Two. And they're pretty good. I have to wake them up in the morning. And I'm not saying they're great at everything. Because are they teenagers? No, I know. I think one of them's like four, but going on like 14. Got it. I've got a three-nager in the other room at the moment. Have you? A three-nager. Yeah. I'm going to be just busying actually can I ask your opinion because I've made a vegetarian, you are vegetarian not vegan? Not vegan, correct Okay fine because I just put goat's cheese on the thing so I've made galettes, galettes with pumpkin, onions, goat's cheese, I've kind of pureed the pumpkin but I think that the Delisa pumpkins look so nice, do you say Delisa is it Delica?

9:15I don't know, I say Delica but I'm not sure, I don't know because they're from Sicily aren't they? Don't you know? Yeah. Okay, I'm going to go get a duck. They're from Sicily. I think so. I think they all come from Sicily. And they cure them, don't they? I don't know. Tell me more. And then they come with their magical wax. Do you have to peel off a wax seal? Yes, it's so romantic. It's such a magnificently special pumpkin that they have to stamp it. Basically, I pureed some of the flesh, but I was going to put some more on top. But do you think that is pumpkin overload? If you've already got the puree?

9:46I don't think so. It could be a nice textural situation. so where did you learn to cook I mean my mum is an amazing cook and I didn't learn how to cook when I was a kid because I was like semi a brat and sort of took it for granted that she was incredible but also she used to kick me out of the kitchen and say go and do your homework you know I want you to become a doctor and she wanted like that sort of safety and security for me and so I went to university and not knowing how to cook until I got homesick and I was out one night with some friends and they we were in a curry house on brick lane and they said oh what should we order from the menu and I said well this isn't the food that I grew up eating um this like baby puree corn but I didn't realize that people didn't know that it was like nothing like the gujarati gorgeous like vegetarian food so where are you what's your heritage gujarati so gujarati That's on the west coast of India.

10:46And it's a state that's got the population, like roughly a similar sized population to the UK. So about 66 million or something like that. And so it's not small. And it is predominantly vegetarian because in, I think it's about 250 BC, there was an emperor called Ashoka. And after a particularly bloody war, he said, no more blood must be spilled. Okay, it will be veggies. Yes, exactly. And then there's this principle of Ahimsa, which is Buddhist, which is also kind of no harm must be done to people. And so traditionally, Hindus are quite like peace loving, you know. And so, you know, the cuisine is centuries old, this way of.

11:29And so when people are starting to talk about plant based food and being vegan, being vegetarian here and it feeling like a trend. I mean, we're talking there's so many bits of the world that have been eating vegan, vegetarian food for thousands of years. This brings us on to your column. How long have you been the vegan columnist for The Guardian? Seven and a half going on, eight years, and I didn't think I'd last beyond a couple of weeks. Am I right in thinking you weren't vegan at the time when you started to do the column? Yeah, I wasn't vegan, and I'm still not vegan, but I love vegetables, and I love animals predominantly when they're alive.

12:04And so those two things kind of propelled me forward. But what happened was I got a phone call out of the blue one day from Melissa Deans, who is like the editor of the then Guardian Weekend magazine. She loved Fresh India, my second book, which is all vegetarian and said, oh, you know, cook loads of dishes out there. There's loads of vegan dishes. Would you consider heading up this column? And I should have said no, because, you know, I wasn't vegan. And I also had a four month old baby at the time. but I could see friends of mine struggling all around me to try and figure out like the western plates made up of like a big slab of meat in the middle of it and vegetables on the side and they I could tell that you know they didn't really know exactly what to cook and I felt like I could add to the conversation because I'd grown up eating like vegetarian food and and absolutely loving it and I thought you know if I looked east towards like beyond India towards thailand and vietnam that i'd find examples of like other cultures and cuisines that put vegetables in the center of the table and there are so many of them like if you look at thailand like there's like 95 percent of thailand um or thai people are buddhist and i didn't know that yes they do eat meat but like it's not like a primary the the cuisine's evolved without it being a primary ingredient and so typically like like if you think about a sometime salad you can take a little bit of meat out uh with no like real rupture to the recipe it's still going to be absolutely delicious but how would you replace like the fish sauce so you can get like vegan fish sauce it's really good yeah thai tastes make a really good one and i think it's made with so you can make with fish sauce yeah and i think they make the fish sauce with um seaweed because it's kind of got that okay salty salty umami thing going on my daughter in the last week has said I like chickens mum I want to be a vegetarian I said that's absolutely fine darling but you need to eat a few more vegetables I think if we're going to do this how do your children eat do they eat well they're all right I think they haven't always eaten well yeah so Aria my eldest used to come home and just demand like buttered pasta most nights and then she self-elected to become a vegetarian I think they're like you know she's like part of like the eco council at school and she's got I know they've got like she's got a thousand teddy bears in her room like she really loves animals and just didn't want to eat them and I said exactly the same thing you're gonna have to eat loads of vegetables so we kind of started just taking them off one by one and I think there's just something about like having a bit more agency and or say in what she wants to do and she just has started eating load tons more vegetables now and it's been the most incredible journey because before she wouldn't like touch you know whatever we put in front of her and she wouldn't try it but she wants like she's desperate to be vegetarian and the other one yogi just kind of fell out of the womb just putting everything she could in her mouth and it's not fussy at all she's like a self-elected flexitarian and god knows where she's got that from because it wasn't me how old if there's a sausage going she'll definitely eat it four-year-old that's yeah yeah that's do you cook meat for them i don't know but he he's he's like the only proper carnivore in our family and so that's your husband yes yeah and so he'll like occasionally cook some sausages or like roast a chicken alongside what I'm doing and so that we can all eat together and you don't mind no I don't mind because like I mostly ate vegetarian food growing up but when my grandfather moved over to Uganda he started hunting antelope and baking them in in like an oven dug out of the earth and so I'm used to eating meat I just don't eat that much of an i don't cook it at home yeah yeah and i've got like a real weak spot for prawns myself so oh have you do you still eat them i do because i'm not you know as i say i'm a pescatarian but it's just this kind of problem with needing to label yourself because really i don't 95 of what i eat comes from plants but food isn't just fuel it's it's also history nostalgia pleasure tradition that's our whole podcast is it yeah there you go where were you brought up um so born in scunthorpe of all places i know have you haven't got the accent well because my parents are from uganda and i went to school in hull and i don't think you can only tell on certain words like bath and grass and i can't get rid of that a do your family still live there yeah they still live there in a little village in lincolnshire and behind their house is a potato factory and there's like pinks all around and yeah they're still there and there's a very small Indian community there there's not that many but my my grandfather came into this country he met someone at a desk you know like they were part of that exodus in 1972 where like 28 ,000 Ugandan Asians came over and he was such a proud man and he said oh I don't want to take handouts from the British government and so tell me where I can get a job and the person on the other side of the desk said oh here they're looking for lorry drivers at Scunthorpe Steelworks so we ended up in Scunthorpe of all places um so we were the only indians in the village and it was great though i mean were they nice were people nice to you honestly i mean i never had a problem at all i just i mean i think the only thing that it probably did for me was i was the one saying oh i don't want to go to school smelling of curry and fried onions and and so i didn't want curry for dinner i really wanted that's what nisha katona did she i wanted like spaghetti hoops on toast or wanted to go to pizza what she said she did and when friends came back for dinner they were expecting or they came back for tea after school they're expecting indian food and she'd say give them egg and chips yeah i mean it was amazing from a food point of view because lincolnshire's where like a lot of our produce grows you know they used to have like loads of potatoes like they used to have special railways that would carry them like from Lincolnshire to London for the markets and Gujarati potato curry is like famous but so we ate a lot of potatoes when I was growing up and like loads of cabbage.

18:10What do your parents do? So mum she had a news agent when I was growing up and helped dad and he is a financial advisor so he's still working and so you know things to do with like pensions and insurance and but very aspirational I mean yeah really I would say so I think they really wanted to make a good life my I mean they were they came into this country they had everything taken from them my grandfather was really wealthy in Uganda he was self-made he like set up the first coca-cola bottling factory one of the first printing presses in Uganda he was in business with the Tilda family when they were like doing orange juice and not rice wow and um that's that in Uganda that was in Uganda so Tilda from Uganda they are yeah so it was just all sorts of strange coming over to the UK because they were pretty poor and my parents lived in that estate that was notorious on that channel 4 documentary called Skint you know the one and so they in they just became very thrifty I mean they ate curried baked beans and cabbage curry for days and and I think I really love that because I feel like the way that my mum cooked it was very much about very cheap store cupboard cooking lentils beans all you know cooked from scratch but then she'd take whatever was in the fields around us ended up in the green grocers or given to us by neighbours like whether it was mares or like abrasive pheasants I mean anything really uh leeks kale I mean whatever grew she would just curry it she was also really curious which I love like super passionate so we'd like pirouette around the markets and she'd say make sure you look for the aubergines with the bright green tops because they're fresh and so I really learned from her like how to pick like good quality vegetables yeah but so yeah my memories of home were kind of her making this incredible food this like the smell of basmati steaming and dal like my favorite favorite dal which is your favorite dal I mean it's called a Daily Dal and it's in Made in India.

20:10And I love that. I mean, I love many dals, many dals in my heart now. But that was my favourite growing up. Masala omelettes on Sundays. Yum! Yeah, Dad putting Elvis on the record player or Latamangeshka playing and chai. I mean, it was gorgeous. So what's the basis of your curries or your mum's curries? Is it onions, tomatoes, garlic and... yeah well which spices would you not be able to do a curry without okay so family curry typical gujarati spicing you're looking at equal parts ground coriander already this sounds straightforward yeah it's equal parts ground coriander and cumin okay and they complement each other so well because cumin's this like dark brooding horse of a spice it smells a little bit like fresh man's wet in a nice way and coriander is this like light floral like lemony like really happy smell so those two go really well together and then there's kashmiri chili turmeric always mainly for health related and that's equal parts as well or not i mean you can add those like i don't know typically add like half a teaspoon of turmeric and then chili like as you wish and so those are the core spices and occasionally she'll start a like some people like make a spiced oil called a turka after you've cooked something and then put it in she likes to do it before because it would stink the house out where you get your oil nice and hot and you throw some mustard seeds in there and they become nice and nutty or some fenugreek seeds and I said well why do you do that and she said oh it's mostly for health purposes so I really think you could just get away with having like cumin coriander kashmiri chili turmeric and salt and that would be it and you could that's like predominantly what she used now typically in gujarati cooking you don't really use onion and garlic that much but she was raised um partly because they were living in like really rural uganda she was raised by a punjabi family and the punjabi way of cooking is like a lot richer where you use like onions and garlic and lots of ginger and she uses tons of garlic i love garlic I mean I love using so much that you can kind of smell it on your skin the next day This is such a treat My favourite thing is being invited over to other people's houses Do you, we've had chefs on before and they've said that sometimes people really feel the pressure of cooking for you Well for a chef Do you find that people kind of freak out and don't know what to do?

22:37I mean sometimes, I just feel like Hugh and I love hosting and so we tend to host quite a lot how did you two meet uh so we had so he came to my flat when i wasn't there and he saw my bike he's kind of a bike nut and saw my book collection and really wanted to like know more about me and so invited me over why was he there when you weren't there because he's friends with my flatmate and he was having a dinner party and I was at work. Okay. He broke me in. And when I met him, there was like, he looks like he splattered the walls with blood. There was like, he was making a fessingian from scratch.

23:19His mother-in-law is like Armenian. A fessingian. That's what Simon Le Bon was talking about on radio. Oh, really? It's gorgeous if you had it. No, I need to do this. Oh, it's so good. It's so good. How do you sell it? F-E-S. E-N-J-A-N and it's typically made I think with chicken or lamb Le Bon did it with lamb last night he said me he said lamb and so he'd made a mess in your kitchen not my kitchen, his kitchen yeah he'd just kind of really gone to town and doing this thing from scratch and it was gorgeous and at the time I was working on I was putting ping pong tables all across like London I don't know if you've seen ping pong tables anywhere hold on ping pong what like playing ping pong was it that was it why were you doing that was it those places called ping pong and you could go there and play ping pong no so it wasn't that okay so it was like before i was in feed i had an arts organization called sing london which i'd have to set up we put pianos and ping pong tables on the streets of cities in a bid to sort of get people together and we didn't make any money from it we were just kind of funded by different parts and he worked in advertising and he wasn't very good at flirting so I thought he was offering me free advertising until I turned up to a date and anyway it was really nice and Bess and John's now like one of our very special dishes but we make it with aubergine now so we'll typically have that like Christmas time or when people come over and it's like the beginning of a rom-com don't you think yeah it could be could be nobody wants this part two but set in London Yeah, and it was like a scene out of a Bridget Jones-style thing because his name's Hugh DeWinton, and so I thought he had land and was quite rich, and he's not, actually.

25:09Yeah, he sounds it. Yeah. Was that what compelled you to go on the date? I mean, yeah, obviously. Maybe they used to have land. Maybe. I think they did. He said there's a lot of dead DeWintons in Wales, and so maybe there's like a patch of land with my name, with his name waiting on it over there somewhere. By the way, I'm acknowledging now, the carrots are crunchy because I decided to scrub them Did you frighten them? Did I shock them? No but I scrubbed them I was like I'm just going to keep them with the fucking skin on because it didn't have that much skin I was like I'm just going to be rustic I'm not going to do that next time because I can taste crunch I prefer them Like the taste of soil No I can't taste soil You may in a minute What did you do at university?

25:57to you so I did industrial relations which is a really weird thing to study where LSE London School of Economics is that kind of like city planning is it start something I mean explain to us what industrial so industrial relations is sort of the relationship between business and people and government and like kind of organizing how people work and so it's kind of you know it's all about trade unions and workers rights and employment law and how businesses operate and I don't really I kind of did it because I was doing young enterprise at school and I was a managing director but my team was like they were all rugby lads and we were painting photo frames and it was like a total nightmare and I was like this is so interesting like I can't get anyone to do anything and so I sort of became really interested in the people side of business like the kind of human face of it but I didn't really realize that like studying it would mean like I eat there's like kind of two routes out of it and one is maybe human resources and the other one's like you know trade unionism and that neither of those appealed to me in any way shape or form and so I was spat out of it and set up my own dating agency um which was that took such a turn was this before or after the ping pong it was before I think I didn't know what I wanted to do and I didn't really have any um my parents like work for themselves I knew I wanted to do something for myself and I didn't really know what I wanted to do I didn't want to kind of go into insurance like my dad had and at the time my cousin was looking for a husband but she'd only ever dated English boys and she was looking for an Indian husband and like the family was passing around these books with like bios and like photos like tacked into them and I was like this is crazy and so I met with the owners of JDate yes because it was actually the or the people who founded it because it was the only online dating agency that existed at the time so for people that don't know what JDate is it's um a very very old dating it was before an app wasn't it or not maybe it was one of the first online dating websites and it's for jewish people to meet jewish people yeah and so this one was meant to be for indian people to meet other indian people and it was called fancy and indian and i'm really i'm really sad that i gave up the url because it i don't know it's just such a great url you could be like a tech oh my god i could be so rich you could be a billionaire by now imagine what does your mum say about this i mean she plans she was thrilled yeah exactly she'd find a good husband this day darling yeah she would have been they've pumped money into it and at the same time i was like working at a um a call center selling anti-wrinkle cream and in a and in your spare time you were a teapot as my grandma would say you've done everything so you in your spare time you're a teapot i don't know why i love that like you can do everything so you also can be a teapot i mean i was just being i was you know doing sort of part-time documentary making until i was fired i had i basically tried my hand yeah i really felt like i was and maybe that is like second generation immigrant you know something that i feel like my immigrant parents gave to me it was like you can do anything you know because they started from scratch and they you know managed to come out of their estate and like buy a lovely old rickety house somewhere and you know have a nice life in Lincolnshire how far did fancy the Indian go fancy an Indian go I mean it went as far as me printing t-shirts and handing out flyers in like Leicester Square I organized a couple of events any marriages no it didn't get that far because nobody can I tell you what happened there because also So at the time I knew I'd been told about Hugh, my now husband, and my friend said, oh, you should talk to him because he's really good at playlists.

30:02So I was organising. I did a couple of in-person events called Save the Date where, you know, you had to show the other, you know, who you were looking to date, like how good you were at like flipping pancakes, like blindfolded. And he did the playlist and he couldn't make it to an event, but we ended up getting married anyway. Have you started writing this story down? This is a Netflix film. Yeah. But did any of the people you'd set up end up marrying? I know people who got together from a ping pong parlour that I had from the ping pong time. That makes you sound like a madame. My parlour, the ping pong parlour.

30:40My ping pong parlour. Susan Sarandon has ping pong tables. That's her business. What? How do you know that? What, like the bars in New York, those ones? Yeah. ah because it was so trendy at some point how long ago was this good question it was 2004 five 2004 okay yes quite a while ago and I say I kind of fell into the food thing was a bit of an accident like I've always loved food yeah the fact that I've got books out was because of a two-minute conversation that just changed the course of my life and so like I was working at Innocent Drinks you know the smoothie company. Of course you were. And loved it there it was like in there when they were really buzzing.

31:29Yeah so I was number 55 I think through the door and it was just a brilliant place to work and they offered this thing called a scholarship which was a thousand pounds to make your dreams come true. Arguably I needed more than a thousand pounds but I was like I'll take it. So you had to stand up in front of the company and pitch Dragon's Den style your idea and then people would vote and I said oh I want to go and meet my family in India that I haven't met in Gujarat write down the family recipes and then I'm going to you know make a book and give it to everyone and by that I meant like I'm going to write it up on the work on word on the work computers print it out on the work computers and then just give it to people who worked at Innocent only one of the guys who voted for me a guy called Pete was fixing my laptop one day and he's like oh I voted for you and my wife's an editor at Simon and she used to go and meet with her and I was like whatever please fix my laptop I need to go and get this PowerPoint presentation done and so I went to meet with her and not thinking anything of it because I'm a brown girl from Scunthorpe and like people like me didn't publish cookbooks and Bryony Gowlett changed my life because she said this could be a book and you know I'll send you a list of agents and go home write a proposal and practically kick me out of the restaurant and so two weeks later from meeting her I had an agent and then five weeks later I had five publishing deals on the table and I just still can't believe that that would have never have happened if I hadn't talked to yourself to try and win a grant but also talked to Pete Gowlett who was fixing my laptop it was just a two-minute conversation Are you still friends with him?

33:02I am still friends with him and Bryony. And I just think, you know, these things can just happen out of, like, magic out of nowhere. Kismet, though. Maybe it was meant to be. Maybe it was meant to be. What's kismet mean? Like serendipity. Really? It's kind of like what was meant to be. Maybe I wasn't meant to be, like, a tech entrepreneur. Maybe you still are. Maybe. Maybe you're about to be a big Hollywood producer, Banks. Because the story of your life is fascinating. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I was going to say, is there anything you've not done yet? i think um partly what i found was because i don't know if you know this but like i had a breakdown and so um and i laughed but it wasn't actually a laughing matter it was actually quite a horrible period in my life this after your second child it was but i don't think it was related to her because it was i did have her during a pandemic and i think the reasons for why why it happened are quite complicated it might have been burnout it could have been you know intense work deadlines um or having a newborn baby etc but i just didn't i fell out of love with like life and cooking and had to find my way back to the kitchen sort of step by step and meal by meal which is what the book dinner is about so now I think my point of saying that is I don't really I try and sort of live in the little pockets of life these days rather than sort of ambitiously try and do new things I'm presuming that's because you used to potentially think the other way and that was you felt detrimental yes I think what happened was I think my identity was very closely tied to achievement and so I just like went through life thinking that I could do everything and then just trying to do all of these things and I loved it don't get me wrong okay just I fed off it it felt like I had like air in my lungs when I was doing all of this new stuff and I felt like invincible and it's like I'll go make documentaries I'll go and do this I felt fearless like you do when you're in your 20s you know you just feel like you can do anything but do you think there's also pressure because you are second generation immigrant totally I just felt like you know my parents have sort of set the bar really high and they said you know we want you to be successful yeah we want you to and then they kind of laid out like a set of jobs that they wanted me to be happy and it came from the place that was really good because they had had to like you know they were hiding from the milkman they didn't have any money and they just wanted security and safety for me so it came from a really good place what helped you get better so it was it all hinged on one day and uh so it's probably been in bed for I just didn't want to get out of bed I felt very lethargic and like all of my senses just narrowed down to nothing and I felt really discombobulated about what was going on and then you know after months and months of the same thing Hugh my husband was starting to crack under the pressure because he'd been looking after our two girls including our little baby and me and also doing all the family cooking and he said I'd love you to cook me a meal and it was his way of saying I really need you to care for me I need someone to care for me and to love me and so I just woke up I'd been so sort of in my own head and I ran into the kitchen and I grabbed some lentils and some coconut milk and then went to the freezer where I keep you know all my chilies curry leaves lemongrass you name it and then I made this like Malaysian dal that we'd eaten bucket loads of in Singapore and I when I made it I just felt really like I felt like fresh air like in my lungs I felt like energy in my fingertips and I really loved doing it and it felt so different to you know I felt energetic for a start and I loved cooking which I hadn't wanted to do and so I thought maybe there's something in this here and maybe I just need to cook for myself or for pleasure or for joy but not for work not for deadlines not for books and so I started like cooking just kind of feeling my way through and you know it was typically fried eggs in like soy and butter over rice like we're talking really simple things like tofu fried rice or tomato pasta with a bit of kimchi in there and I just kept a record of these things and then this orange notebook that we keep by the microwave just started to fill up over time and then I was meant to be under contract to write another book and I spoke to my editor and I was already like a year late at this point on this book and I said listen I really think I'm I feel like this is giving me such purpose like I felt like by planning dinner I felt really grounded and by cooking it it was like a small sense of achievement in my day and then with like coming around the table with everyone it just was just magic I just loved it which I know sounds really basic but before that I'll say that like I might have been working all day on a lime pickle recipe trying to perfect it I couldn't give that to the kids so then we'd give them pasta or something Hugh and I would eat later and it was all quite disjointed but like here we were just all kind of eating this one thing together and so dinner just became this like thing that I really felt like had so much magic and power in it I think maybe as humans we've always known that coming around the dinner table is a really wonderful joyful brilliant thing but I'd lost sight of it I just I couldn't really see it what do you think was wrong with you I think it was stuff that I hadn't addressed from my childhood that you know and I think it was a lot of my identity was tied into work and so I just kept on saying yes and I like putting a lot of pressure on myself to do things and then I think part of it was also writing recipes for I mean I've been in the game for 10 years now and initially I started because I wanted to record my mum's recipes and I wanted to record them because I wanted to pass them on and suddenly I found myself not cooking the food that I'd grown up eating the dal the spinach and paneer curries the aubergine and tomato curries that she cooked day in day out like you know the smell of char chapatis on the toa that like just filled you know that's the smell of my childhood and I just got so far away from that I think and it's not like I was like power hungry but you just can like go down a path and not I just didn't look behind me until it was a bit too late that resonates so much that you you're on this hamster wheel where it's all good stuff so therefore there's no reason to want to jump off until you burn yourself out and I got to the point where you know I have wonderful management and supportive people around me but I was just like I on the outside everyone's going you're doing so well it's so good like and you're like you don't know what you're doing and also having young children I that resonates so much I mean I feel like this weight has been lifted that I have made this decision not to tour next year and that's just one aspect I love touring but the juggle of that with the podcast making new music with promoting with being a parent it was like just even having that little bit has made me be able to feel like i can be a better parent and a better podcaster and artist i don't know yeah i i think it's really powerful that you say that because i think there are lots of people who will look at you from the outside thinking how does she do it all yeah and i hate that because they go how do you do it all and i'm like actually i'm really struggling yeah you know and i'm sure it's similar similar with you it's hard to have it all as a woman isn't it it really is it really really is and we're part of this experimental generation raising our kids and working full-time and it's it's really hard I feel like I've broken free from it I mean I'm still work in progress but I'll have this idea that I want to create like I don't know a fresh supermarket dull range or something and then send out a few emails and then I'll think crap I need to I need to delete those because I shouldn't really be starting a new project I really need to you know leave enough time for myself to just enjoy life feel the sun on my face in the morning do the yoga classes that i love doing spend time with my kids like my idea of success these days looks like being able to pick up the kids at 3 30 and we do that on a friday and then we have film night and i am just the happiest

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43:23Where do you think the best curry is in London? So my favorite place is Saravana Boven. Have you heard of it? No. Okay, so they've got, I don't about five branches across London but the one that's closest to me is East Ham and there's a big South Indian community there and the four of us like my family love to go on a Sunday early lunch kids eat early but at the same time all of these South Indian families are tipping out of the temples the women have got fresh jasmine in their hair and all their beautiful temple jewellery on in their saris and you're sitting bum to bum with them in Saravana bum and it's more like a canteen but it's really lively like properly pumping in there and we order a big jug of mango lassi and then like rounds of doses and like dhal butter fry and you know if you order a dose it's not just a dose it comes with beautifully spiced potatoes all the fresh coconut chutney the sambar i mean so good and jalapeno so it's not really a typical kind of curry house like but does the job yeah that sounds great would you like a restaurant no I do think so because I think if I had a restaurant I'd probably feel the need to be in it every day and also I cook I cook home cooking like my food the heart of it is like proper home food and so my favorite thing is when people have cooked something and then it just becomes part of their like repertoire and something that they love and so I think if I opened a restaurant I'd feel the need to make it like fancy or fussy and that's not really who I am or what my food's Samir, if you invite me for dinner, what are you going to cook?

45:01Not lunchtime. I want to come in the evening where I can not just have mango lassi unless it's laced with something exciting. So just tell me. What kind of stuff do you like? You can see I'm a difficult, tricky... No, she doesn't. I'm going veggie because she cooks... You like oboe-sham, but it's not good for your arthritis. Yeah, oboe-sham is not... Oh, is it not? No, nightshades. All the nightshades are not good for arthritis, so I try. I'm not supposed to eat potatoes tomatoes this is becoming quite a tight brief you'd have to do your sexy chilli paneer oh yeah okay that's what I would do not too hot for me we'd start with panipouris because they're loads of fun tell me how you make panipouris are they a little one I've seen people on Masterchef Oh, they're stunning.

45:56And you make them. When you put them in the oil, they puff up. Yes. Oh, wow. I don't make them myself. I just buy them. Where can you buy them? Okay, so you can buy them from any Indian grocery store. But have a look at it. Pick up the box and have a look at the bottom. Make sure there's not too many shards because obviously it relies on the liquid staying in. Otherwise, it gays all over whatever you're wearing. And then you poke a hole in with your thumb. Yeah. I put them to one side and then make a gorgeous, delicious concoction of tamarind, like roasted cumin seeds, mint, coriander, a little bit of lemon.

46:31And that's sort of like panny, like a water that goes in. And then sprouted mung beans, like voluptuous chickpeas, like the ones that we've just eaten. You are so good with your words. You're like freaking Nigel Slater. You, Nigel Slater, could have like a word off about how you speak about food. voluptuous chickpeas voluptuous chickpeas but they do taste like take that nigel later yeah take that embarrassingly sexy don't they when you eat them and they're so creamy um i love that so you've kept basically you get this shell you put all the little things in there and like you can sometimes get these like little chickpea crisps and you pour the water and it's got to go into your gob within about five seconds and they are just amazing they taste delicious like a flavour explosion and I'd make you a Naked and Famous which is the worst name for a cocktail in the history of man oh my god it's terrible, do you know it?

47:22no I don't we're going to have it though now it's like the kind of grown up sexier cousin of a margarita so you make it Naked and Famous who made this up? I don't know how could they make a sexier and more grown up margarita and then have such a bad name with that so is tequila the base? so yeah it's mezcal and lime so you know component parts of a margarita in a way and then you add aperol and yellow chartreuse oh man oh wow this is a shit mix yeah this is like gonna get you rocked yeah it's kind of like can have one shouldn't have two okay yeah and do you put lots of ice in do you shake it yes yeah and it's the color of a miami sunset and you have to sip it quite slowly but it's so delicious I bet so good wow so main course that's a good one I think I might make you don't like it too spicy oh no it's fine because it Indian food doesn't have to be yeah well I mean Southeast Asian food doesn't have to be spicy you can just you don't have to I didn't add it in for my kids like I'll add a little bit in that they won't be able to taste but when I have people over I like to bung things in the oven now I used to make very elaborate five-course meals and now post-burnout and very much like you know assembly job or do it in advance and so this butter panneer curry and the recipes in dinner is a really good one because you chuck everything into a pan and you don't normally make a curry in a pan so it's quite a weird experiment for me but I love it because it's so easy and I can just I'd be able to sit down and we could just chat away good drinking our naked and famous cocktails yeah and actually you know before i used to be like a jack-in-a-box kind of jumping up and down so i'd make that for you and it goes really well i know it's not in season but with an asparagus thoran which is a keralan dish like coconut mustard seed um no but i i mean i cook quite like my mom i use british produce and then I will cook something Southeast Asian with that and I'm a real tinkerer as well so I'm not typically like an authentic cook in any way shape or form I'm just I like to just cook what would be for pudding what would I make for pudding like again I try to make things easy on myself now and the ice cream that I love to serve people is the pistachio and lemon one that's the hackney gelato have you had that I love the gelato I like the banana one oh I've not had that oh it's like banana and peanut butter or something like that it's so good they are so good they're bloody good they're bloody good and so my sneaky hack is that i kind of whiz up some like um brown sugar and pistachios and like decorate like throw it over the top so it looks it looks nice and maybe serve it with some fruit but i mean if you were fully signed up paid up member of the vegan experience or the vegetarian experience i'd make you my cheesecake because it's not made with real cheese and i just think what's it made of it's a good question yes and it was just a mountain to climb and i think partly that and my 18 carat laxa i just need to talk about because there's such absurd recipes one's got a kilo of carrots in it oh my god that vegan vanilla baked cheesecake looks i'm going to do that how many times did it take you to get that right yeah no many many many times because no one's agreed on what vegan dairy is and so trying to write a recipe around an ingredient that just you know is a shape shifter it's not an easy thing but that's why I love the internet because someone I think I might have posted that I was struggling to like write this recipe because it kept on splitting and this guy trying to remember his name it will come to me but he got in touch and said I think I know what your problem is it's like the ratios of this to this and I was like he's actually just made like he's made my year but the fact that we've created something now together and it's like this like it's kind of a it's almost like the state of affairs on vegan dairy and also the internet because that could have only happened like now otherwise i would have failed and wouldn't be able to publish this recipe i just think is it's really great that we can get here because veganism is still relatively new in this country and so i feel it's one of those ones it's like what are you grateful for i'm like vegan dairy this guy who helped me with this recipe

51:45you guys i'm really pleased with it that is amazing that is otolenghi levels it's actually wow so it's brown sugar meringue with a mascarpone coffee cream cream cool and cherries and grated chocolate and i'm not a pudding girl and i think this it was really easy so shout out ravney That is unreal. That is good. And that is like the perfect chewy meringue. I know. So good. She puts corn flour on hers. I have heard of that. Do you also use vinegar? No, she didn't. No. But this is banging. No good. Can I ask you what your last supper would be? Starter, main, pud, drink of, I think I know the drink of choice.

52:34Is it going to be a naked and famous? It is. um you're going away to a desert island and you cannot have these delicious foods okay so in 2013 i took a road trip around india with my then boyfriend he's now my husband and we ended up in kerala in a place called varkala oh yeah have you yeah so we were invited to kamari's house have you been to kamari's house i don't know damn you need to go back to kerala you need to go back to her house is like paradise not only does she cook from scratch but she grew everything from scratch And I'm not just talking about vegetables. She made her own coconut oil.

53:08She had her own cow, like peppercorns, cardamom, cinnamon, everything. And so she made us this beautiful meal with 13 different curries, like beetroot pachadi, black-eyed beans, cabbage leeks, dahls, like uphams. It's like fermented rice pancake. It was a sensational meal and like the best of the trip. And then after we'd finished, she fed the banana leaf that she served onto the cow. So it was like also a no waste situation. And so I adored that meal. And I've just, it's rarely been matched since. If I was, you know, if it was my last meal, my first call would be to Kamari to come and cook. It was just unreal.

53:51Would she do the whole meal? She would. So I think typically with Indian foods, you don't really tend to have like starters, mains and pods. You just keep going. Yeah, exactly. you've just got 13 or 14 or 15 things in the center of the table so I think that's probably what I'd do I'd have like a feast that sounds heavenly and to finish to finish I think well I mean this is quite incongruent but if it's my last meal and we're just allowed to be yeah whoever we are I would probably have a tiramisu which sounds bonkers considering the meal that just preceded it but it's one of the greatest desserts in the world I mean tiramisu is amazing especially when it's made really well and I had a sensational pistachio one recently it was so good where from so it was a girl called Rupa Badani who made it and um she ran a supper club in 56 St James which is in Walthamstow like quite close to me and it was mind-blowingly good mind-blowing and I'm kind of just trying to see if I can inch in and become friends with her so She might give me the recipe.

54:56So imagine that, like coffee and pistachio cream. Oh. Mira, it's been such a pleasure hearing you speak and speak so bravely and beautifully about your struggles, but also a wonderful outcome, which is dinner. And thank you so much for being on. And it's so, I'm so... Your story's about food. You make everything come alive. The luxurious chickpeas. I'm going to bring that up again. I love that. Well, listen, I've absolutely loved it. I love meeting you two. I think what you're doing is amazing. Your food is sensational. It was absolutely brilliant, darling. Yeah, and that's good. Would you like me to put it in a doggy bag?

55:38Yes. Yeah, I'd make it at home. Yeah, because I gave you a huge one. I'd like to be polite and say, no, don't go to the trouble, but it's just too good.

56:00Thank you so much to Mira Soda for coming on and being so honest and fabulous and generous. I mean, she came in, I have to say, that's very generous by her. We haven't been getting as many prezies from guests recently. Beautiful flowers. What other guests have lacked in presents she made up for in flowers, flowers beautiful and honey cake just a word for all the PRs that have their people coming on just fucking bring me a bottle Jessica don't be grasping but that was very generous and appreciated and how thoughtful that we're recording this because she knew it was around Rosh Hashanah and it's just so and it's the Claudia Rodin recipe of the goat the goat thank you Mira I loved hearing her talking about food and her upbringing and her relationship with ingredients and meals and um very articulate oh my goodness just like yeah and i'm i'm gonna finish the shabbily with you no darling i think i better not really how's that fast gonna be tomorrow you're gonna be you're gonna be dehydrated i'm gonna not drink tonight thank you to mirisoda her book dinner is out now so if you ever and as she said she says she's a lazy cook she wants to get the best flavor in the quickest time possible that's my kind of gal so if you're looking for a vegan vegetarian recipe book this could be quite well i have to say she's one of my favorite i loved that to be honest listening to her talk about food i could have i was annoyed that the cab was here to do this she's also got a beautiful voice it's very soothing and you know you'd have a good night out with meira yeah naked naked and famous i'm in thank you Mira and thank you to everyone that listened Mira Stode's book Dinner is out now go and get it

58:15If you're a smoker or vaper ready to make a change, you really only need one good reason. But with Zinn Nicotine Pouches, you'll discover many good reasons. Zinn is America's number one nicotine pouch brand. Plus, Zinn offers a robust rewards program. There are lots of options when it comes to nicotine satisfaction. But there's only one Zinn. Check out Zinn.com slash find to find Zinn at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.