Roy - Tasty Express: Simple, Stylish & Delicious Dishes for People on the Go

Food has that power: to capture a snapshot in time of a poignant memory and replay it for you when you need it most. It is truly a celebration of all the senses. I was born in India and grew up in bustling Mumbai when it was called Bombay. It was a fantastical place, forever festooned with crowds, colours, flavours and culture. I grew up on some of the best street food the country has to offer. A couple of decades later I married Nick, my college sweetheart, and we moved to Singapore.

There we immersed ourselves in the culinary delights of South East Asia, from Malaysia to Thailand and everything in-between. When I finished my day working as a designer and web consultant, I would spend my night cooking and nurturing a food blog. Cook Republic started as a small online cooking journal in 2005 and grew into a visual timeline of my food adventures and daily life when we moved to Australia. Nearly eight years after its conception, it won Best Blog in the Australian Writers Centre Best Australian Blogs awards in 2013. The overwhelming love and support from the online community and people in the real world touched me to the core. We now call Sydney home where we live with our two boys, two rabbits and four crazy chooks.

We used to have a garden full of veggies, but that was before we welcomed the chooks (darned chickens!). Our life in Sydney is constantly busy and varied. We love daily chicken chasing, weekend fruit picking at local orchards, weekly visits to farmers markets, scouring the local nurseries for that new herb pot, packing picnics for bike rides, and cooking together. Kneading bread and making fresh pasta dough with the boys is one of our favourite activities, one that often ends up with too much flour on the floor and a lop-sided loaf. Because we are always on the go, the food I have created for this book reflects my commitment to developing fast, simple, tasty and wholesome dishes for the whole family. I am not a trained chef, merely an enthusiastic cook who is always hungry for more.

My style of cooking is adventurous and fun and I love creating easy twists on time-tested classics. I have always been a champion of fresh, reasonably fast and exciting food the kind of dishes that lead a double life, happily going from a hard working lunchbox staple to an exciting dinner side or lazy weekend breakfast. Very often a good knife, a pan and a handful of fresh ingredients is all you need. This has always been my kitchen mantra. In Tasty Express I share with you some of my dearest recipes from my childhood in India with a modern makeover, of course. I also share recipes that have been inspired by the countless market stalls, food trucks and famous eateries I have explored in all the countries I have visited or lived in.

And there are plenty of naughty treats because we all need one! Because I mainly eat a plant-based diet, the recipes are predominantly vegetarian, but they can easily be adapted to include your own preferences. For example, Sweet & Sour Potatoes could easily be transformed with pork or chicken, a quick stir fry like Spicy Moroccan Sprouts would welcome the addition of fresh tiger prawns, the Cashew & Pea Curry could be made heartier with succulent pieces of lamb and the scrumptious Beetroot Leaf Flatbreads could be bumped up with mince. The occasional meat dish makes an appearance every now and then, and likewise most of these can be adapted to suit vegetarians. Nicks Minced Lamb Tacos would be equally delicious with finely chopped mushrooms and the prawns in the Tea Smoked Fried Rice could be substituted with chunks of firm marinated tofu. The recipes are flexible and the possibilities to make them your own are endless. I reveal recipes that will enhance your cooking experience because they are so ridiculously easy, like a luscious One-Minute Coconut Mug cake with Creamy Lemon Curd to keep you company on the couch at night, or a delicious cup of hot chocolate spiked with chai to warm your breath on a cold morning.

I show you a never-fail method of cooking quinoa because having a box of cooked quinoa in your freezer will change your life! I show you how to grow sprouts with every imaginable legume and seed on your kitchen counter using just a jar and a piece of paper towel. I bring you breads that go from flour to loaf in under one hour, five-minute chutneys you could take along to barbecues, nutrition-dense muffins that freeze well and cheeky granolas you could package for Christmas gifts. Plus there are heaps of sauces, smoothies, dips, cordials, spice mixes, marinades and pastes that will become the splashes of colour on the blank canvas of your culinary repertoire.