Early March, I was having lunch with some friends – one of whom is really into buying lovely clothes and going on holidays.  Her Instagram pictures tell the story of a high maintenance lady. We got to talking about Social media and food blogging and she made a remark which made me laugh at the time but rings true today.  She said that she could see herself not buying clothes  but  people would always need food so blogging about food was better than writing about clothes and fashion.

During the pandemic when we were all under quarantine, what she had joked about  rang quite true as we were not spending so much on fashionable clothes and shoes but we still needed to eat and therefore spent a lot more of money on Groceries.  As more people are working  from home, we have taken to social media to look for every answer.  People are not eating out or getting many takeaways, and more of us have started to cook at home.  Most of us started by just cooking regular meals and we are now turning to Social Media and looking for recipes of food we enjoyed eating in restaurants and in my case i was looking for recipes which would be easy to cook with less ingredients like this oatmeal peanut butter cookies.

Being a food blogger for a long time and I started teaching Cookery to adults in 2014. I now realise how outdated this article I wrote about setting up cookery workshops is going to look in  a  few years!!  I loved going to the Waitrose Cookery School for one of their classes and really enjoyed the experience .   I loved teaching and meeting different people who were so keen to learn about the Indian vegetarian food and culture. Over the last 10 weeks being in lock down, I have been keeping busy by continuing to teach Indian cookery online. I never thought cookery lessons online would be possible but I have managed  to do several online cookery classes – often by substituting several ingredients.

Using Zoom and Teams – forms of online video communication – I had never heard of!! For my first ever online class, I taught how to make farsi puris,  on Zoom with joindiaspo.com. Cooking online was new for the learners as well as me as a teacher.  I did find this first lesson quite difficult as I had to cook and everyone had to follow along and I wasn’t sure if the learners would be able to follow along.  I was impressed with how user friendly Zoom was and how everyone managed to keep up and cook along and make an unusual dish like farsi puris.

Cooked by my neighbour by cooking along with me.

For our second session, again with joindiaspo.com we cooked Kidney bean and sweetcorn curry using Zoom . Again a very happy buzzing class.

My third Zoom session was done for my colleagues for a team well being event.   We made pakoras using bread and plain flour (as we couldn’t get chickpea flour) and everyone was pleasantly surprised at how well the session went and how nice the pakoras and tomato dip tasted. We also made samosas for another well being event.

Cooked by one of my colleagues

Cooked along with me by my colleagues to enjoy at home

Things have moved along so fast since my cook a long with joindiaspo.com

My friend and fellow blogger Nayna Kanaber and took it in turns to give free online cookery lessons to keep friends, family, neighbours etc. motivated and inspired during this difficult time.  Our online cookery classes are now a positive success story as we have officially launched our Cook with Mina and Nayna Cookery Classes.

My colleagues including their kids in the cooking

Cook along with my niece who wanted to surprise her dad on Father’s day.