Quite Simply Shai
by: Ayesha Azfar

"As public interest in good food grows, Shai is all for cooking schools being opened. “We should have cooking schools that teach hygiene and the basics of cooking — for instance, the cuisine in different parts of the world, the right temperature for food safety, how to fix something that goes wrong, how to pair food, etc. This is what I was taught. That’s what being a chef is all about.”

If variety is the spice of life then Shaista Qazi hasn’t done too badly. An object of considerable admiration on a food channel both for her eclectic menus and her colourful attire, Shai, as she is popularly known, enjoys talking about where life has taken her. She has no reservations about relating her struggles in a conservative family milieu or her concerns over the ‘lack of ethics’ displayed by fellow cooks on national TV.

Shai’s professional qualifications are impeccable. She is a graduate of New York’s Institute of Culinary Education, and a “blue-ribbon graduate”, she beams. Upon completion of her course in 2001, she worked for several eateries that included top restaurants and catering companies in New York. But the laurels have come with a price that has included the disapproval of many of her choices in life from a family she loves.

Her decision to do a Master’s degree in plant sciences from Karachi University after graduating from Government College Quetta did not go down well with her family, although her mother supported her, giving Shai Rs500 per month for expenses.

Neither was it easy convincing them to let her join British Airways as a flight attendant after university and a short stint in the human resource department of a local hotel. “I felt guilty I had made a bad decision for my family,” she recalls, explaining why she quit her flying job and returned to the hotel. “Afterwards, I noticed that everybody was doing their own thing. I realised I had made the wrong move.”

She then took up a job with Saudi Airlines, and loved the travelling part of it. It also paid her well. However, hating restrictions of any sort (she once broke off an engagement when her fiancé criticised her way of dressing), she found it difficult to breathe in the stuffy Saudi society. Fortune smiled upon her in the form of an Indian who lived in New York and was at that time working for a hospital in Saudi Arabia. He proposed, the two got married and life took on a new turn in America.

Here she worked for an air charter company, often taking off for exotic and remote places. “I realised the world is full of good food,” she recalls. “When I came to America, I went to these big supermarkets full of gorgeous stuff — seafood, vegetables, juices, etc.” When the company went bankrupt, she decided to enrol in cooking school. “I watched Food Network. I would get ideas and then practise my own thing.” The results — and her husband’s and friends’ views — were encouraging, and two years at the cooking institute honed her skills to the point where the chef in her decided to take over.

But the seeds for what she describes as her second passion — next to music (she attends Karachi’s National Academy of Performing Arts where she learns classical singing) — had been sown much earlier. “My father was a big foodie and would get strange stuff like tongue and brain. My mother always made a lot of noise when he did, so he went into the kitchen himself and got me to help him.”

Necessity also played a part in her later inventions — for Shai is not comfortable following recipes and likes to create her own. Once during her Karachi University days, she and her friends sat down to partake of a hostel meal of what appeared to be spicy aubergines (bagharey baingan). To her horror, the girl next to her had a rat, not an aubergine, on her plate. “I decided then to make my own food. I would make this wonderful dish where I would put some rice, vegetables and salt in a pan and let it boil. It was tasty and my friends said they loved it.”

Her current, live programme on Masala is Simply Shai, a variation on the title of her planned cookbook cum memoir Simply Chef Shai. However, episodes of her earlier programme ‘Tapas with Shai’ are also aired regularly, where the recipes are based on the popular Spanish appetisers. That proved more to the audience’s liking than her earlier programme ‘30-Minute Meals with Shai’, she concedes.

The show was hastily put together because she was getting ready to go back to the States. “I took tapas as my theme, and then used all kinds of recipes — Spanish, Indian and Italian — to create my own. My idea was not to have just Spanish tapas because for that you need certain ingredients which people can’t always get. Conversely, for 30-Minute Meals, I took out all the recipes I had learned at cooking school. But perhaps people could not follow these because all the ingredients were so expensive and so different from the ones used in Pakistani cooking.”

“Sometimes I think I was born in a wrong society. Perhaps, I am too westernised. I used to watch the Mary Tyler Moore Show as a child. In the programme, she had her own studio apartment. I was inspired by her life. I used to think that one day I would be like her, and have my own apartment, make my own money and not be dependent on any man.”

Shai herself enjoys Italian — “I love pasta” — and French food that she admires for its texture and different layers of flavour. While elements of these feature prominently in her recipes, she has been reluctant to focus on Oriental cooking.

“For Chinese or Thai cuisine, you need a special type of kitchen. You need high heat — very high heat. And for that you need a special gas connection that gives you a blast of gas. You need woks and a special kind of stove. This is how they quickly cook Chinese food. That is not possible in the home kitchen or on the sets. If the final product is not what I am looking for, then it is useless to teach people,” she says.

Having cooked frequently for her family in Pakistan, “I know what people here will like. I try to keep that in mind and then design my own dishes, some of which I make for the first time on the sets.”

She wouldn’t mind doing a show on the lines of BBC’s Ready, Steady, Cook. “You can give me some ingredients,” she says, “and I’ll come up with several dishes. It’s rather like an artist’s palette where you create with different colours. That’s what being a chef is all about. I can never follow recipes from a book. If you are stuck with measurements, you will never become a good chef or cook.”

However, giving free rein to one’s imagination in the kitchen does not mean disregarding some basic rules. Here Shai is critical of other cooks for not following these. According to her, frequent violation of cooking principles detracts from the sophistication that one sees on channels like BBC Food where the chefs know their ingredients and all about the art of cooking and presentation. Yet, they retain their passion for further discovery.

“Nobody is professional here. Few have gone for formal training,” she says. “Then there are certain ethics that you follow when you become a chef. For instance, cooks on TV here are noisy. We were told that when you cut your vegetables, make sure there is no noise. In America, those who do not follow this are called shoemakers, not chefs. Also, many cooks here chop raw chicken, which may contain salmonella, and then use the same cutting board to cut vegetables, without cleaning it. The problem is that many of them are too self-absorbed, and don’t care.”

As public interest in good food grows, Shai is all for cooking schools being opened. Only “not of the kind that we read about in newspaper ads,” she says. “We should have cooking schools that teach hygiene and the basics of cooking — for instance, the cuisine in different parts of the world, the right temperature for food safety, how to fix something that goes wrong, how to pair food, etc. This is what I was taught. I had to read tons of books in cooking school and to sit for a lot of exams. You can’t attend some pasta- or cake-making classes and then claim you are a chef.”

Nevertheless, for all their flaws many of the cooks on TV have huge followings as the number of calls they take during live shows or the emails they receive indicate. “Unfortunately, people who are watching them don’t know much about cooking. For myself, I could write books on the mistakes they make,” she says.

Quite clearly, Shai has the best of both worlds. She comes to Pakistan for six months and spends the rest of the year with her husband, who, she says, is broadminded enough to give her the space she needs.

While her connection with Pakistan runs deep, which is why she loves being here, the West allows her to breathe freely. “Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong society,” she muses. “Perhaps I am too westernised. I used to watch the Mary Tyler Moore Show as a child. In the programme, she had her own studio apartment. I was inspired by her life. I used to think that one day I would be like her, and have my own apartment, make my own money and not be dependent on any man. It is so nice to have your own life, to do your own thing, with your own hands, and to earn your own money. It’s God’s blessing. Sitting at home can turn women into psycho cases. I have the perfect life.”