(and, free right now on Amazon Kindle for the next three days!)

If you’ve been visiting this blog over the past couple of years, you may have noticed that I published a cookbook sometime back. Lockdown Lunches: The World on a Plate was a documentation of twenty-six lunches, one for every fortnight of the year starting April 2020, when Covid struck and India went into lockdown. As I’d explained when I introduced that book, the lockdown meant that my family—my husband, I, and our daughter, ardent foodies who enjoy eating out and exploring interesting new cuisines—found ourselves stuck at home and getting increasingly bored with the mundanity of everyday meals. To relieve the boredom, I decided we’d party at home: every two weeks, a three-course meal featuring the cuisine of a different country. Complete with a specially curated playlist of music from that country.

Those twenty-six lunches, menus, recipes, and some background food history about the countries in question, were chronicled in Lockdown Lunches. However, our lunches didn’t stop there. By the time I’d published Lockdown Lunches, we’d already done quite a few more of our lunch parties. 

A sequel, I decided, was in order. This, therefore: Unlocked Lunches. Because, of course, by the time I finished with this batch of twenty-six lunches, the lockdown was over and done with. Like Lockdown Lunches, Unlocked Lunches too is divided into chapters, each chapter prefaced with a short insight into the country’s food and how it’s evolved, what are the important elements of the cuisine, and so on. Then, there’s the menu, and all the recipes.

In the making of Lockdown Lunches, because our daughter (then all of six years old) had been so excited and had so many interesting insights and anecdotes to offer, I had included that—by way of comic relief, really—for each chapter. In Unlocked Lunches, I decided to skip that, so if you’re a fan of the LO (the ‘Little One’, as I used to call her; she’s now nearly eleven and no longer little), sorry. What I do have, though, is a brief introduction to the menu, some tips and tricks for distributing the work involved, and such.

Some notes. For one, while most of the main courses are based around animal protein, I made it a point to have vegetarian starters and side dishes to compensate for all that meat. You will therefore find plenty of vegetarian recipes here. Also, I made an attempt to curate my menus in such a way that they could be easily made in the average Indian kitchen: without too much fuss, without too many exotic ingredients that might break the bank or be impossible to get hold of. And, importantly, recipes in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: delicious without involving a lot of backbreaking work. Among the countries whose food you’ll find featured in Unlocked Lunches are Thailand, Lebanon, Morocco, Mexico, and Belgium.

Here, then, is Unlocked Lunches. It’s a digital-only book, available on Amazon Kindle. All Amazon sites worldwide have it, and for the next three days, starting today, it’s free for download.

Click here to buy it on Amazon India; here for Amazon US; here for Amazon UK; and so on. Whichever Amazon website you opt for, simply search on it for ‘Unlocked Lunches Madhulika Liddle’, and you should be able to get it. Happy reading!

If you enjoy exploring food cultures, if food interests you, give this one a try. Bon appetit!