Everyone gets excited when I attempt to make a new dish," says Shreya Sotang as she arranges the ingredients for the fish curry that she will be making. With the air of someone who has been in the kitchen long enough to know every spice and ingredient, the 'Hamro deshma' singer swears by her love for food. The first time she cooked a dish without help from anyone, she was in Grade 8.
"My Chhyama had only given me instructions in the name of help and I made the chicken curry. Everybody loved it," she says with satisfaction. Since then, she has been the go-to person for her family members as she can come up with new and interesting dishes. Not surprisingly, they have her as someone who cooks many varieties of dishes. Her parents, especially her father, are a fan of the grilled chicken she prepares on special occasions.
Her love for cooking sprouted as she herself likes to eat a lot. She calls herself a foodie who used to indulge in good old fries but who has increasingly become health conscious. "I try to include healthy ingredients when I cook. Ironically, I'm the one who asks my family members to eat healthy. Hence, I make salads, hoping they would abide by me," she says.
One of the main reasons salads are a regular in her kitchen is because the Nepali staple dal-bhat-tarkari-achar doesn't hold the same power over her as any other Nepali. She would rather eat a diet consisting of curries and roti. Whenever she goes out to eat, she makes keen observations of a dish she likes so that she can replicate, and to the delight of her family and friends, she does so without any complaints.
And she doesn't limit herself to just that. "I watch a lot of cookery shows and have even bought a couple of cookbooks over the years for that purpose," she says. Of all the dishes that she has attempted to make and mastered, she thinks that yomari challenges you the most. "The shape is really hard to perfect. There are so many things that can go wrong with it. However, I got the hang of it after making three of those," she says, smug.
With every dish, she makes sure that it's balanced in taste and portion. "The less portion of anything you make, the better it tastes," she says. Similarly, she seeks to make the dishes balanced in tastes. It was her grandfather from who she learnt that a dish had to be balanced in all aspects.
"My grandfather said that using a lot of onion and sugar while preparing any kind of curry will help caramelize and accentuates the color and taste of it," she says. To this day, she hasn't forgotten his advice. After all, she wants to cook in a way that is both fruitful and easy. This, in all, is her mantra for good cooking.
As told to Sachi Mulmi