Make restaurant-quality Indian food at home with these spice packs with local ties

Growing up in Anderson Township in the 1970s and ‘80s, Kalpana Waikar had little appreciation of the samosas, dal soups and curries her mother prepared in the kitchen each night. Even as the aromas of the cardamom, cinnamon and cumin – spices her mother toasted and ground by hand – filled their home, Waikar and her two older brothers longed for more American cuisine.

“We ate Indian food for dinner every night, but sometimes I just wanted spaghetti or Chef Boyardee or, quote-unquote, 'regular food,'” Waikar said. “I didn’t really appreciate Indian food. I thought it was more fuel than something to be enjoyed.”

Like most kids, Waikar – who was born in the northeastern Indian state of Bihar before her parents moved her to the United States as a 3-month-old – just wanted to fit in. But attending Turpin High School in the 1980s, a school that was (and remains) more than 90% white, made that difficult. Her goal, she said, was simple: “I was focused on trying to hide my background.”

That didn't come easy. “My mom wore a sari, and my parents had thick accents,” Waikar said.

I should mention here that I grew up with Waikar, nee Sinha, and have long considered her a friend. I remember going to her house as a kid after she offered to help me type up my term paper (I was a terrible typist) and how the smell of her mother's cooking made her house feel more alive than any home I'd visited in A-Town before.

Waikar's childhood attempt to hide her Indian heritage seems a bit ironic given that she is currently making a name for herself selling Indian spice kits as part of Inspired Indian, a company she launched in 2019 as an online endeavor and expanded into a brick-and-mortar location near her current home of Evanston, Illinois, in 2021.

Waikar says she’s sold at least 20,000 of the kits so far and that they were a hit at this year’s Fancy Food Show, in New York, capturing the attention of food personalities such as TV host and cookbook author Chadwick Boyd.

“She’s created a quality product line that does something unique for home cooks who love Indian flavors,” Boyd said of Waikar. “A kit with whole spices to toast (and) cook with added ingredients. It transforms how many will experience good Indian food, especially at home.”

The foods we long for

As she grew older, Waikar started longing for the foods and the food memories of her childhood. Visits to Bihar, where she often visited her grandparents and extended family, loomed large. She told me of the thatched hut in her grandparents’ center courtyard, the one that housed a brick coal-burning oven that seemed to always have a pot cooking fresh vegetables, meats and spices all day long.

“Everybody seemed to know what they were doing,” she recalls. “They always cooked what they had bought that day − fruits and vegetables and freshly slaughtered meats that they spent all day cooking. I remember being fascinated by the transformation of these raw ingredients into these incredible foods with so much complexity.”

Waikar also recalls the strong feelings of connection those foods brought her both in Bihar and at home in Cincinnati. Her family was part of a network of Indian families who held regular dinner parties at their homes. “There was always homecooked food in huge aluminum disposable containers," she said. "There were kids in the basement, dads drinking scotch and moms in the kitchen getting food ready.”

It's memories like these that helped Waikar – now a married mother of two – decide to leave her job as an academic adviser at Northwestern University and share her Indian heritage with others through food. After realizing the thing that stops many home cooks from preparing Indian food is the number of spices required, she decided to create a company that would make it easier, toasting and grinding the same spices her mother once did, sometimes with her own daughter, Sarika. Shopping lists and recipes are printed on the back of each packet and include popular dishes such as saag paneer, tikka masala, aloo gobi and vindaloo among many others.

I’ve tried several of Waikar's spice kits and, while yes, she's a friend, I can't help but be impressed by how easy she makes it to toss together a restaurant-quality Indian meal in a half hour or so.

My wife, Amy, and I recently tried her chicken tikka masala, which came together in about a half hour and made our kitchen smell the same way I remember Waikar's home smelling in the '80s. With a quick sautee of some chicken thighs and a little dicing here and there, we had a dish that was pretty much on par with the version served at the Indian restaurant right around the corner from us. Unlike that one, ours wasn't as packed with heavy (albeit delicious) amounts of butter or ghee, either.

Waikar has come a long way from those high school days when she tried to hide her identity. “I spent so much of my life trying not to focus on being Indian, but went full circle to making Indian food and culture available to a broader audience," she told me. I'm glad she's succeeding in doing that. And as a former A-Towner myself, I'm kind of proud of her, too.

You can order spice kits from Inspired Indian at inspiredindiancooking.com ($8.95 each).

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Inspired Indian spice packs make homemade chicken tikka masala easy