Blowing Our Minds… Fruitastic!

Fruitastic! was awarded the prestigous Gourmand World Cookbook Awards prize for the categories, "Best Single Subject Cookbook" and "Best Health and Nutrition”. The book is all about treating fruits as complete meals instead of after meals, and has stuff like Guava Curry and Jackfruit Biriyani. Weird! We spoke to Fruitastic! author Mohana Gill on her passion for fruits and vegetables. She says that we need to look at vegetables and fruits in different ways, and it can be served as a delicious main meal. Yeah, right! And then, she set the trap… She invited us to dinner where she says that she will cook recipes from her books to convince us to see things another way. I told myself “Aunty Mohana, if the food is as delicious as you say, I’ll write an article about Fruitastic and, Dang! I’d even put you on our Food Channel at FriedChillies.TV”. Well, so.. here’s the article and 6 episodes of Aunty Mohana will be on air from the 8th July 2007… She totally blew our minds…

"She totally blew our minds…"

Aunty Mohana's Fruitastic Legacy.

“I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world” - M.F.K. Fisher, The

Mohana Gill is one of those wonderful gems. Fondly known as Aunty Mohana, she was born and raised in Myanmar, educated in England and Canada. Together with her husband and three sons, she loves to feed people, a consummate nurturer. Nothing makes her happier than seeing someone tuck into her food with gusto. We at FriedChillies love meeting this rare breed of Gourmands and Gastronomic Geniuses perhaps because we love to eat. It’s a serendipitous encounter of those who live to eat and those who live to nourish. A match made in heaven we’d say. A heaven full of honeyed streams, chocolate-leaved trees and cobbled stones of freshly baked baguettes. Yummy…

“Eating is one of the most important things in our lives,” says the youthful cook and author, Burmese born but pretty much Malaysian since 1965. “We learn to eat from when we are born. Whatever you eat builds your body.” Her concern is that there is too much unconscious eating going on nowadays. “If people just think a little bit of what they are putting in their mouths.” In this age of aplenty there is an abundance of food, the processed kind, the fast kind, the utterly rubbish kind. Given with so much choice, us as consumers and diners are prone to grab anything convenient without much thought on what it does to our bodies.