How a depressed single woman cooked her way into New Year 2017, and loved it

There's a special kind of hell that comes around the New Year - packaged in bright, shiny streets with silver stars and Santas, telling you how you can buy a flat-screen TV at 10 per cent discount. 

In these times, cities are amplifiers, or even loudspeakers for loneliness. Add a touch of demonetisation to the mix and the fact that you may be far away from family, are single, and stuck in one of the few non-alcohol places in the world, and the picture completes itself.

There I am, in a dark corner in my flat in Ahmedabad, slumped in front of a screen, dying slowly of food and TV coma, and I'm not even Slyvia Plath. Or George Michael.

So I sat up and said to myself, I have to find a way to turn this picture on its head. By cooking my way into the new year. It would have to be a grand feast, the preparing of which would be its own new ju, to use Masterchef-y words. And lift me out of my single-in-no-alcohol-city-depression.

Suddenly, I wanted to invent a New Year tradition. Take old world food - European old world that is; and serve it to new people. And so I turned to a dear friend, Charles, who lives in London and cooks up a storm every Sunday for his family.

He had for some time now been fantasising about being able to cook his favourite European food in India, with local ingredients. Now, as 2016 came to an ominous close, Charles was also suffering from post-Brexit depression. Perfect.

I decided to call him and ask if I could be his long distance surrogate cook in India and make a European feast, on his behalf. "You can't get to India to carry out your fantasy right now, so can I do it for you?" I suggested. He jumped at the idea.

And then came the series of challenges that stood in the way of accomplishing this feat.

Much of the food across Europe is meat and it is cooked in alcohol. And in Ahmedabad you can't get any. With an extra special crackdown by the state government, even bootleggers had disappeared.

Add to that, of the seven of us - me and six friends that I had now called for the feast; one was vegetarian and the others mainly ate chicken. So Charles had to come up with a suitable European chicken dish with ingredients I would hopefully not have to commit a major crime to source in the state of Gujarat.

When we spoke, Charles was in his second home in rural France, so he pulled out an old recipe book, and fixed on a chicken recipe from Alsace, on the French-German border. Traditionally, this is chicken slow cooked in a broth of beer and gin, but in Ahmedabad, I would have to improvise. Would it work?

Charles and I thought it was well worth a try. Over the next two days, much of the directing of this food opera was done while Charles was on the road, between France and England. And I, his happy slave, went to the butcher's shop to pick the right chicken.

"I've just WhatsApped you pictures, check your message so I can place the order!" I said over the phone. "No no, get chicken with the skin on if you can. How big is this chicken, it should be 1.5 kilos... okay that should work."

Next stop, another store at the other end of the city, for parsley. Thankfully, the other ingredients were not exotic at all - mushrooms and onions and my local vendor was happy to provide them.

The menu I eventually fixed on was in three parts.

Part One: The starter. Freshly baked artisan bread and cream cheese infused with dried herbs from one of my favourite restaurants in Ahmedabad - The Philosophy Club. A vegan restaurant run by a Spanish woman and fellow single-in-the-city Gemma Ferre. 

Part Two: The main course. Alsasian chicken in a mushroom, onion reduction; a cauliflower and broccoli in cheese bake which was a Jamie Oliver recipe I had downloaded from the internet and tried before; and a spicy red sauce pasta infused with fresh dill.

Part Three: The dessert. I decided to do a simple ice cream and fruits with a dark chocolate sauce and crushed biscuit, set in the freezer in layers.

By the time my autorickshaw was stuffed with all the ingredients, I was excited. My words came out in an avalanche like they normally do and my voice was back to its normal non-depressed pitch.

Asif bhai, my trusty auto-rickshaw driver and friend, informed me that the auto had just packed up. A spark plug or some such wire had snapped. We stopped to have it fixed and ate a celebratory pre-New Year's Eve feast on the go.

Chicken Frankie rolls, and pizza; as we talked of many things... "of how the sea was boiling hot and how the pigs had wings." (aka Lewis Carroll - The Walrus and The Carpenter) 2016 was as surreal and Lewis Carroll-esque a year as you can get.

"Madam, ek baat poochoon, aapko bura toh nahi lagega? Aapki shaadi nahi hui...?" - that question that everyone wonders about us strange-single-people-in-the-city. "Madam, if you don't mind my asking," Asif was saying, as he chomped on his spicy chicken roll, "you're not married?"

No, I am not and I have no trouble saying it. Especially since, armed with new and exotic food and friends to cook for, my New Year would not be underlined with pathos. I was on such a high that I spent the 30th night making the broccoli and cheese sauce for the cauliflower bake and then just could not sleep until 4am.

On D day, I was up bright and early, in anticipation of being the perfect host. The house needed to be dusted. Broken things rapidly fixed. I may be cooking a European feast, but I am still a very Indian host, brought up to please. To overdo, outdo and generally speaking make up for my "single" status with mood lighting, music and great food.

Two hours for people to arrive. Time to slow cook the chicken. I had bought too much and now it wasn't all fitting into the pot. I stuffed the chicken, mushrooms and onions and sent a picture to Charles. "Does this look right to you?" Thankfully he said it did.

By the time the sauce had reduced and I whisked in the cream and butter, the sauce turned a lovely, salty brown. But the cream scattered it into a slightly powdery consistency. Had it curdled? Never mind, I stirred and stirred and hoped it would be okay.

I stared anxiously as my friend Rajiv fed a spoonful of chicken to his four-year-old son. "Was the chicken good or bad?" I asked, holding my breath. "Bad," was the definitive reply. But I was already in gourmet heaven. I liked it and moreover, loved what making it had done for me.

Some of the adults also said it was perhaps a bit too European for their liking but somehow, they said it was all okay. And they loved the cauliflower and broccoli bake and the dessert. Pasta is now commonplace. The poor second cousin to the otherwise exotic family of food on offer. So it elicited no comments.

By the time the strawberry, apple and kiwi in ice-cream was done, it was midnight. And in Ahmedabad, you don't need to check the time on your mobile to know the year has turned. A cloud-burst of firecrackers erupted in true Gujarati fashion and we knew with that crackle, that 2016 had fallen away.

But as an amateur and surrogate chef, I had already kneaded in the new year a few days ago, in cooking decadent chicken with good cheer.

Also read: Healthy eating in five easy steps