How Home Cooks are helping Preserve Culinary Secrets?
Secret recipes, hand me down notes, scribbles on the back of a wore out cash memo … all sounds so familiar yet something that is ever so quickly being lost to our fast paced mobile lives.
Remember the joy of freshly baked cupcakes for breakfast or the smell of the roast in the oven or even the aroma of basmati rice that fills the house when being made…hmmm such were the joyous memories of childhood.
In today’s jet setting lives and demanding jobs there is very little time left for cooking or ‘thinking about what to cook’. With the variety of food and cuisines available at the click of button it’s now very easy to satisfy hunger but what about satisfying the cravings of the soul?? Don’t many of those always remain unanswered? These days we still find ourselves looking for food that tastes and smells just like home to relish and enjoy the simple pleasure of a home cooked meal.
Technology has enabled the world to become a global village. Traditional recipes and foods that weren’t earlier available on a commercial platform are now slowly making their way out with this new breed of cooks called ‘home chefs’. At Mealby we have taken it on ourselves to bridge the gap between such traditional home cooks and the market that is missing these traditional home cooked meals
Take for example Leonard, our passionate chef from the land of the Dracula’s( now don’t get scared he doesn’t bite ;) ), Transylvania, Romania. He has been cooking recipes handed to him by his grandmother. Till date he uses the very traditional techniques for preservation of meat and vegetables. He also tries to buy fruits and vegetable when in seasons and stocks to preserves them like in the olden days.
Leonard’s Grandmother and all her recipes have been the inspiration behind starting the L’Aubergine Caravan, a mobile food truck that goes around the Netherlands attending various food festivals. His popular and fastest moving dish the ‘Sexy Small Bites’ is a perfect blend of traditional meeting the new age as it has the very authentic, Romanian aubergine salad on a juicy slice of grilled aubergine coupled with a slice fried pizza bread topped with parmesan cheese. He wants to revive and popularize traditional Romanian recipes that most people outside Romania aren't even aware off.
While Valeria, our trained and professional chef from Genova ( the land of Pesto ), Italy. She moved to the Netherlands in 2009, the lack of Italian condiments and ingredients propelled her to source the special and rare ingredients directly from Italy . Hence her cooking oozes of the Italian love, flavour and texture. Her Genoese Pasqualina cake with spinach and ricotta cheese at LA FUCINA, a famous Italian restaurant in the Amsterdam Oost area is a runaway hit and has people coming back for more, which is a treat to all the senses.
Mealby has painstaking discovered each of these jewels and is working towards adding more to this glorious list of passionate home chefs. So, make sure to check the weekly menù available in your neighbourhood at www.mealby.com
The new ‘Home chef Revolution’ is at the very nascent stage but has garnered a lot of interest and curiosity. So, enjoy the pleasures of a global cuisines in their nutritious and purest state — as prepared in their respective countries.
