How did this book take shape?
In the past two years, unknowingly, I had begun to formulate Aai’s Recipes. My mother was turning 80 this year, and I wanted to give her a meaningful gift. It began with Aai (Marathi: mother) writing out my favourite recipes, which she believed could be followed by my daughter Devika, who is 21, and born and bred in the US. When I asked my daughter to type out all her Aaji’s (Marathi: grandma’s) recipes, we discovered that she wasn’t able to understand some of the terminology. She re-wrote those to make it easily understandable to readers from the Western world. That’s how the the book emerged in its current form.u00a0Another factor that inspired the book was the stream of visitors — Asian-American and Indian — who would visit our home in Goa and savour this cuisine. Many were hoteliers or food and wine connoisseurs. They would remark about how they had never tasted this cuisine and and wanted to know if it was freely available, or if my mother or I could teach their chefs to include these dishes on their restaurant menus. I took it for granted all my life and assumed that everybody had access to this cuisine. This feedback made me turn this project from a private family book into one to be put into public domain, as a resource for future generations.

A spread of CKP delicacies