One pot chickpea pulao
A spectacular rice dish that is more than the sum of its humble parts
Hey there! My name is Apoorva Sripathi, I’m a writer, editor, and artist. This week’s paid subscriber newsletter is a recipe for a quick and rewarding chickpea pulao. I hope you’ll give it a go! If you’d like to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. Thank you so much!
For the first ever recipe in this series ‘A recipe for’, I remember mentioning that this would be a diary cookbook, combining both kitchen and life commentary as well as instructions on how to cook a dish. As to how faithful I’ve maintained that promise is left to you reader, but I also know I rarely spill a lot about my life here. This chickpea pulao might change things.
I always struggle to write down a recipe to give it to friends, or for my burgeoning recipe column over at Something Curated, or even here. I find it difficult to pin down what I consider are absolutes: you cook like you live life, carefree, joyous, and unconfined. But I also know that not everyone cooks that way (or even know how to start). When I was telling my partner about the pulao I’d made after a really tiring day and he replied saying he was thinking about making it for dinner too1, I seemed to have no problem putting down the recipe on text five minutes later, funnily enough.
What is difficult is remembering what I did before making the pulao that made me tired. I woke up really early that day, worked out, and made breakfast, wrote a few lines in my diary, reread a few pages from Bird by Bird, and got ready to meet my friend for lunch. And you’re thinking these are the facts that you’ve been withholding from us? Please keep it to yourself.
I’ve been moving in grief in these last few weeks, chiefly because I’m finally moving away from home2 after I moved here in 2020, a decision that was not mine to make. At 35, living and spending time with your parents is seen as outrageous and unbecoming – and in these five years, these formative years of my 30s, I have done the uncool things repeatedly: walking with my mother around the neighbourhood, fighting with my father, photographing all the cats that I see everyday and making zines about them, talking to people I haven’t talked with in years, writing this newsletter, discovering a love for working out, sitting in silence, cooking and writing down recipes.