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Edinburgh Reporter
01-05-2025
- Business
- Edinburgh Reporter
Spicing up my life – from the Wirral to Ethiopia
When was the last time you discovered a new cuisine that completely surprised your taste buds? For me, it was my recent adventure at Muna's, a vibrant Ethiopian restaurant in Tollcross that's rapidly becoming the talk of Edinburgh's food scene. But before I tell you about my experience there, I need to share my long-standing love affair with a particular spice company. I've been smitten with Seasoned Pioneers, a Wirral-based spice company, ever since they sent me some recipe box spices nearly seven years ago under the guise of the Spice Pioneer. Though these particular kits are no longer available, the company itself has become a trusted brand among leading food writers and chefs – Delia Smith and Nick Nairn count themselves as fans, and I'm certainly in that club too. The company was founded by Mark Steene, whose worldwide travels sparked a fascination with international seasonings. Today, the small team at Seasoned Pioneers offers an impressive range of over 300 authentic spices, chillies, herbs, seasonings, and spice blends, including organic options. Each blend in their renowned collection is handmade to traditional recipes, crafted in small batches using up to fifteen carefully selected ingredients. The spices are dry-roasted, ground, and blended, resulting in convenient packages of authentic flavour that capture cuisines from across the globe. As Delia wisely points out, there are two enemies of spice flavour: light and air. Many spices sold in glass jars sit under harsh store lighting, and once opened, they're increasingly exposed to air. Seasoned Pioneers cleverly packages their seasonings in resealable foil packs that shield them from light and eliminate air exposure when properly closed. Their compact size means they don't monopolise precious cupboard space – unless, like me, you've been generously gifted their 'World Spice Blends, The Definitive Selection' Collection of 40 packets! Recently, I reached out to Seasoned Pioneers hoping they might send me their African Berbere Spice Blend (a complex mix of red chillies, fenugreek seeds, ginger, black peppercorns, coriander seeds, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, cardamom, and ajowran). To my delight, they responded with overwhelming generosity, sending four boxes containing 10 packets each of their worldwide seasonings – an array of masalas, curry powders, and spices. With each pouch containing enough for about 20 servings, I'll be eating curries for months to come! My interest in berbere spice was sparked after spotting Muna's restaurant in Tollcross. Having never experienced Ethiopian cuisine before, some girlfriends and I decided to venture there for dinner. Before our visit, I did a bit of homework and learned that Ethiopian food is typically shared communally, with dishes served on large platters of injera (a spongy sourdough flatbread), where diners tear off pieces to scoop up the food. The cuisine is known for its fragrant and often spicy flavours, with berbere spice being the cornerstone ingredient in many dishes. Muna's is a lively 40-seater restaurant run by its namesake, who commands her establishment with warm authority. Word has clearly spread about the generous portions and fair prices, as most tables were booked even for our early 6pm Friday dinner. The interior is cheerfully decorated, giving it more of a casual café vibe than a formal dining establishment. The food arrives on huge dishes presented atop beautiful woven rattan baskets – though if you're a group of four sharing combo plates, you might find your table a bit overwhelmed! The meat and vegetable combo that I shared certainly packed a punch with explosive flavours and spicy heat – and won't be for the faint-hearted! I personally preferred the boiled rice accompaniment to the traditional injera bread, which wasn't quite to my taste. The homemade honey wine also wasn't my cup of tea, served in a long-necked vase-like carafe, which you've to swig out of, but a night off the usual libations didn't hurt. Muna's offers a fun and different dining experience, with the vivacious Muna herself ensuring you feel welcome from the moment you arrive. If you're feeling adventurous and want to try something new, it's definitely worth a visit – though perhaps best suited to smaller groups of two or four who enjoy sharing their food. As for making my own berbere-spiced Wot (stew) at home? You'll have to wait while I perfect my version. It's unlikely to rival Muna's authentic creation, but I'm going to have great fun experimenting with this and the 39 other spice blends I've been gifted. In fact, I'm heading to the kitchen right now to get creative! Like this: Like Related
The Independent
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Nisha Katona's new show is all about lentils, life lessons – and a lot of alpaca poo
If you've ever picked up one of Nisha Katona's cookbooks, or seen her on Great British Menu, you'll know she's super glam and super sharp. What you don't imagine is the businesswoman, Mowgli Street Food empire founder and former child protection barrister assessing alpaca poo. 'I judge animals on the size of their poo, and alpaca poo is very manageable,' says the 53-year-old with a laugh, and she means it. When deciding whether to buy her three alpacas, she remembers: 'I just stood and watched them go to the toilet for about an hour and thought, 'How tough is that to clean?'' The British Indian chef is as passionate about her animals as she is about teaching people 'humble cooking, the stuff you throw together with what's dying in the fridge, what's rotting in the veg rack and what's in the freezer'. Her new ITV1 show, Nisha Katona's Home Kitchen, combines the two in what she calls a 'preposterous privilege'. The series gives us a glimpse into the Wirral-based chef's farm, where she whips up chicken Dhansak and dahl in her outdoor kitchen, and those cuddly alpacas roam, joined by four horses, two tiny dogs (one is sat beside her during our Zoom chat), guinea fowl, chickens and ducks ('We hatch them from eggs, raise them and they come in the house and hand feed'), and potentially in the future, a miniature donkey, poo dependent. And don't worry, you can become emotionally attached to her animals; they are absolutely not on the menu. 'I don't even eat the eggs my chickens give,' says Katona. 'Every single night I go out and just stand with the animals, sit with the goats or the alpacas. They are honestly part of my family. I couldn't eat them, I love them.' The series kicks off boldly, focusing on one of the most unassuming of ingredients that many of us deliberately avoid: lentils. To Katona, they're a delicious kind of magic and 'the cornerstone of Indian cooking'. 'Lentils are possibly the cheapest and most delicious thing you can eat,' she says. 'Showing people how you can create a million flavours in 15 minutes with these dried things in your cupboard, literally, that's alchemy.' Episode one is also packed with tips: swap coriander for lemon zest if someone hates it, freeze ice cube trays of blitzed garlic and ginger to save time, slosh your dahl back into the pan you tempered your spices in 'because we literally don't want to waste one seed'. This is pure Katona, trying to upskill us in every moment. 'I don't want people to just blindly follow things. I want to give them the skills. It's almost like teaching them the neural pathways of an Indian grandmother,' says Katona. 'The more you can give people a story behind why something happens, they're not then clinging to a recipe. I never want people to think, 'I've got to get the recipe book out' to do something. I want it to be in their memories and their stories, in their heads and their fingers.' Throughout the show, Katona shares stories from her own family, from her dad's love of spreading dahl on toast, to getting her Hungarian mother-in-law into the kitchen with her. 'I was very nervous about that because, being on telly, it's one thing for me who voluntarily does it, but my family being caught on telly, you just don't know how they're going to feel about themselves,' says Katona. 'Everyone who sees themselves on telly hates themselves. You hate your voice, you hate the way you look. It's awful! And that's all right, me punishing myself like that, but I don't want that for my family. I was really worried about it. But I've watched some of the clips of us together, and I can just see that I am my happiest self.' Aside from wanting to join the Katona clan, you may find yourself Rightmove-ing 'the Wirral' after seeing the sweeping drone shots of the area's countryside, farmland and vast beaches. 'I am really pathologically passionate about heralding how brilliant it is beyond the M25,' says Katona, who built her first 23 restaurants outside of London (she now has one in the capital, with another opening soon), in places like Preston, Sheffield, Leicester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. 'Cities that I think need social capital. Programmes like this just enhance that mission of mine, which is to show people that there is a great life to be had at a non-punishing rent outside of London,' she buzzes. 'London is the best city in the whole world for food, for me,' she adds, 'but in terms of quality of life, of space where you might want to raise a family, or even if you don't want a family, where you might raise a smallholding and get a nice plot of land and you've got your own patch of stars, that's an amazing thing.' In November, Katona stepped down from the Great British Menu on BBC, and if you're upset, you aren't half as upset as she is. 'I'm so sad! I was FaceTiming with [co-judge] Tom [Kerridge] last night!' she says. 'It makes me want to cry to know I'm not working with them. I love them so much.' But she explains she's got to 'pick my battles'. 'This year, I'm building another five or six restaurants, and I wasn't seeing my family. I wasn't living life – what's the point working that hard when you're sitting and eating on your own in a hotel in the evenings? That's not life. So I had to step off that stage. It's got to be one of the hardest decisions I've made, because I love them and the show. Forget the show. Those humans make my mouth water!' Katona lost a close friend, who was only 56, in November to a heart attack. 'It made me think, you've got one life. You've got to be with the people that matter and do the things that matter. It sounds so stupid and trite to talk about a TV show mattering, but it does matter to me to teach people to be able to cook, and to be able to do that, combined with me actually living a life and feeding my goats, that is a gift I cannot be more grateful for.' She adds: 'We don't need soaring achievements. We don't need massive prowess in life. What we need is contentment.' And ideally, an alpaca to look at the stars with. 'Nisha Katona's Home Kitchen' launches on ITV, ITVX, STV and STV Player at 11:40am on Saturday 8 February.
