Know Your Desi Vegetables (KYDV) Kitchen
The KYDV Kitchen was part of our larger Culinary Arts curation at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2023. Read more about it here.
The Know Your Desi Vegetables (KYDV) Kitchen was an inviting space that spotlighted diverse native Indian produce. We often take the food that grows in our own backyards for granted. At the KYDV stall, visitors learned about a variety of local and seasonal vegetables, and got to taste dishes cooked with them. The stall’s aim was also to promote knowledge of traditional cooking practices and offer insights on inventive techniques to the young and old alike.
Each day, a different desi vegetable took centre stage, changing every few hours. Some of the vegetables featured included drumstick, bilimbi, colocasia (taro) root, banana flower, elephant foot yam, mustard leaves, and karande (air potatoes). Festival-goers enjoyed observing the vegetable in its raw form, as well as experiencing the various textures, tastes, colours, and aromas.
The bilimbi, cooked in three different ways at the KYDV kitchen.
Managing the KYDV stall, The Locavore’s culinary intern, Fardeen Imdad Borah, was struck by how eager and interested people were in learning about each day’s vegetable, some even tasting them for the first time. “Many people were very curious about karande—maybe because it looks unique, and grows on aerial vines unlike other tubers. With bilimbi, too, so many people had it growing in their backyards, but apart from eating it raw, they didn’t know how to cook it. I think our recipes gave them ideas,” shared Fardeen.
“The most precious part of ideating was to watch the entire team bring their bit of creativity to the table, and through iterations, watch the format develop as we lent a part of ourselves to its making.”
— Shreshtha Chhabra, The Locavore
The KYDV Kitchen was rarely bereft of visitors, with some enthusiastic individuals swinging by twice a day, or even thrice, to get a taste of what was cooking. In our kitchen, behind the scenes were eight cooks—all busy peeling, grating, slicing, stirring so that we could give festival-goers a glimpse of all the possibilities of cooking with fresh, local produce. It was heartening for us to see how patient and respectful people were, how keen they were to learn about each vegetable, and best of all, that it inspired them to cook more!
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