"Food Diaries,” Karachi based Zarnak Sidhwa’s popular cook show on Masala TV, the 24-hour cooking channel, will complete its fifth anniversary on October 31 this year. The one-hour Urdu show is aired live from Monday to Friday between 7 to 8 p.m. when she engages viewers from around the world, having chatted with live callers from Pakistan, China and Sweden.
Describing desserts as "my favorite and my forte,” her first show on Masala TV was called "Chocoholics” where all recipes involved the use of chocolate. Since it was in great demand, she was even invited for a second season. "Though I would like to be a chocolatier and only make desserts all my life, my low calorie food, healthy salads and sandwiches and main courses, both Parsi and continental are popular,” she states in her email response to Parsiana. Also fond of "desi food” she cooks both Pakistani and Indian dishes too.
Zarnak Sidhwa with her culinary creation
Cook show episode featuring Navroz
During the month of Ramzan when "the focus on food in our country is great,” she is specially invited to air recorded shows which she considers "quite challenging when we are given certain products to use and we have to come up with different and unique and interesting recipes with them.” She has also done special themed weeks like Ice cream week, Soup week, Chinese week and of course, Parsi week too when her set was decorated with a ses and she wore kurtis depicting gara embroidery and invited Parsi guests on her show. "On Navroz I always do some Parsi food. Its uniqueness yet simplicity makes my audience crave for more always,” she writes.
Until evening she caters from home, gaining fans for her brand Zarnak’s. "My most popular dish that I have sold from home is dhansak,” reveals the chef who describes her venture as "a one-woman show.” Every year she attends a food exposition in Lahore and Karachi where chefs like her "cook live and thousands of people come to meet us, take our autographs and have selfies taken with us!” notes a bemused Sidhwa.
She acknowledges that she is able to pursue her passion thanks to her husband Yazdi, a banker by profession, who "supports my work a lot and without whom I couldn’t have done the traveling and cookery shows.” Their elder son Astad, aged 16, is studying for his O levels and enjoys cooking and rowing. Twelve-year-old Afshad is studying in the seventh grade. Both the boys are good pianists and have played at community functions and for charity events. In fact, they even joined her on a show when she did a Kids’ week.
Taking an interest in cooking since the age of seven, Zarnak remembers assisting her mother, the late Villie Eruch Ghadialy (née Sidhwa), in the kitchen. Giving credit to her mother, "a working woman,” Zarnak believes it is with her "blessings that I am what I am today.” Her mother hailed from a priestly family of Udvada and Sidhwa continues to have links with her maternal family in Udvada, Bombay and Poona.
Having studied at the Mama Parsi Girls’ School where she had her "very first cooking class,” Sidhwa states that she learnt "discipline, time management and neatness from the wonderful teachers there.” After completing her education at St Joseph’s College, she worked for a multinational, serving as a secretary to the chairman and managing director. Convinced that "the kitchen counter was far more interesting,” she later honed her culinary skills under famous chefs in the city and even during her international sojourns she would enroll for short courses, be it a liqueur chocolate class in Bombay or a Thai cooking class on the beaches of Thailand. During her brief stay in the UK "my actual love for baking grew,” she relates. She referred to her interaction with the well-known chef-proprietor Cyrus Todiwala of Café Spice Namasté and being impressed with the way he presented the food when working with the local, available ingredients.
The chef values her growing collection of cookbooks that add to her expertise and has recently authored a chapter on Parsi food for a book on the cuisine of the subcontinent which will soon hit the shelves. Having grown up when there were a few thousands of Parsis in Pakistan, she regrets that numbers have now dropped below 1,400 "with many having migrated. But we are well known and respected here.”