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What is the most descriptive collective noun for coconuts? A cluster? A clump? A crowd? None of them quite sufficed for the copious numbers I found myself with! With five thriving trees in my garden, dangerously dropping their heavy drupes at any given moment, I responded to this abundance in the best way I know how: by bringing them into my kitchen.

So I hired a nimble man to climb up the trees to cut most of the coconuts down, and then we segregated them into tender ones, which yielded nutritious coconut water, and ripe ones with flesh that could be shaved. One of my coconut trees is also the site of an experiment of mine. I have a little basket on a lovely pulley system which takes pieces of papaya up to a nice altitude for the parrots that often flit about. It took a while to convince them that this odd contraption was actually a friendly gesture, but as with people and animals both – at the end of the day, appetite always wins!

restore shaved coconut

The shaved coconuts found themselves in many of my recipes: from coconut rose cupcakes (which you can order here if you’re in Chennai) to sweet-savoury kachoris (which you can make in your own kitchen, with my recipe here) and more. And in the late afternoons, those pristine white shavings of coconut were perfect for a local lentil dish: sundal.

There are always beautiful things that we learn from our parents, grandparents and in-laws. The kitchen is one such space of knowledge shared and passed on. When I got married into the family (in India, due to the joint family system – one marries families, not individuals!) I had the chance to learn more than I had imagined. My mother-in-law is an educated woman who enjoys cooking, and coming from different regions of the country, she and I had different styles and methods. We would often argue about how my family would make a dish a particular way, while she would insist that her family’s recipe was better. So it was with her kachoris, a delicious regional variant of the internationally-ubiquitous samosa.