I sat at the work lunch table on this particular ordinary day. One of my colleagues—and a good friend—leaned over and took a deep sniff.

“Yum! What’s that you’ve got?”

Being a home-lunch-packer, I received this question often and was only too happy to oblige. “It’s a South African Indian version of a sort of shepherd’s pie.”

She peered curiously into my pink bento box. “With spaghetti as well as mashed potato?”

The glass shattered.

Yes. This cottage pie did indeed have both mashed potato and spaghetti. Was that unusual? Of course it was unusual. Why had I never realised this before?

I sat, fork poised, a diner in headlights, as my life’s worth of dinner tables flashed before my eyes. Every meal of my South African Indian childhood had two starchy carbohydrates at its core. Cottage pie (spaghetti, potato). Chicken curry and rice (potato, rice). Our biryani (potato, rice). Our yakhni (potato, rice). Barley chicken (barley, roti).

The conversation and my friend had moved on. But I never did.

I never could. These meals were part of me. Growing up as an Australian, this food anchored me in an otherwise confusing migrant family existence. Possibly the reason I’d never clued in to the oddity that is the double-carb situation is because I absolutely adore my starchy carbohydrates. (Or do I love carbs so much because I grew up surrounded by them?). I went through a phase during which I literally ate Maggi two-minute noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Butter on freshly sliced bread was (who am I kidding, still is) one of my favourite snacks. Macaroni and cheese was the first thing I learned to cook. I was eating bagels back when the only place you could buy them in Australia was Starbucks. Bread flour is a pantry staple for me. I have multiple cookbooks dedicated wholly to potato, pasta, risotto, bread, and pizza. Hell, homemade fettuccine was one of the first things I posted to Instagram. If that doesn’t convey how heavily ingrained complex carbs are in my life, I don’t know what will.

When I got married and first moved out of home, my mother had gifted me a (pre-purchased many years prior and awaiting this moment like a kitchen trousseau) copy of Indian Delights. Hailed as the ‘quintessential South African Indian cookery book’, this tome is produced by the Women’s Cultural Group, an organisation of Muslim women first formed in the 1950s; this is a group that had a profound impact on the Muslim community in South Africa, and in particular its women. The gendered assumptions that underlie Indian Delights are astounding, starting from the very first page with the dedication to “all husbands who maintain that the best cooking effort of their wives can never compare with what ‘mother used to make’.”. The recipes themselves in my copy (circa 2000, the tenth edition. In 2007 Indian Delights hit its thirteenth reprinting) are not strictly Indian, but a South African interpretation of Indian cuisine as well as those dishes that have become “so naturally integrated on the Indian table that they cannot be left out”. It is a tribute to the South African Indian Muslim community in which my parents were raised, and the legacy of which I inherited; a tribute that encapsulates the community’s gender politics, yes, but also the beauty of its quirks.

A flip through Indian Delights presents the reader with treasures such as ‘Cauldron Cooking’, a chapter filled with recipes for mass cooking for ‘large wedding receptions’; a section on ‘The Deep Freeze’ so South African Indian families can best make use of that second freezer in the garage that we all own; advice on health and diet, which speaks primarily to limiting the use of ghee; as well as A Note on Microwave Ovens, as the “signs are there that they will be increasingly used in the future” and this will no doubt ease the burden on the working mother. Indian Delights takes the reader on a global journey, presenting international recipes collected by the community like the bright objects of a bowerbird’s nest. Within the book’s glossy black and white pages you’ll find instructions to make ‘Arabian pita bread’, ‘Quick Bake Pizza’, ‘Chinese Spring Rolls’, and ‘Baked Bean and Cheese Casserole’. The ‘Western Delights’ dessert subsection is particularly glorious, with recipes for Hungarian tart, Scottish shortbread, mille feuilles, and angel food cake (admittedly with an option for burfee-flavoured filling, based on the Indian milk sweet of the same name). But at the book’s heart are the recipes of pilaus and curries and samoosas and mittai (sweets). The tips for making pickles now that the days of gathering at granny’s to make them in bulk for the whole family are long gone. The story of bunny chow (the O.G. cobb loaf casserole), and the joke that khuri khitchri (yellow rice with sour milk gravy) is served to a guest who has overstayed their welcome. Indian Delights translates into the written word the food and culture that I absorbed via osmosis.

I’m sorry to say, Mum, that I’ve used only two recipes from my Indian Delights. (And both were at Mum’s urging and with her heavy editing.)

Since leaving my childhood home and moving on to managing my own kitchen (don’t even get me started on the gender roles in our household), I began to shift the way I ate and the way I cooked. No longer did the double carb star on our dinner plates. Every time I cooked rice, I reminded myself that I did not also need potato or roti. I learned to appreciate other food groups. I fell in love with Palestinian and Thai flavours and built up my collection of cookbooks from around the world. I jumped on board the Sunday Meal Prep bandwagon, routinely cooking up a batch of elaborate salads for a weeks’ worth of lunches for colleagues to curiously comment on and enquire after. My copy of Indian Delights sat untouched on the shelf as a souvenir of my life, rather than any sort of practical cookery book. The cottage pie, chicken curry and rice, potato-laden biryani and others faded into nostalgic memories, cooked for me only by my mother whenever I visited her.

Upon falling pregnant with our first child, I found myself (certainly not for the first time in my life) before a dietician. This time I sought preventative advice. I knew how to eat healthily, of course, I simply wanted to ensure I was on the right track for pregnancy, appropriate weight gain, avoiding gestational diabetes, and other such trivialities involved in growing an entire human. I keenly presented her with my wide and varied tastes and vast nutritional knowledge, speaking of how I snacked on crackers and cheese, mixed nuts, and plain Greek yoghurt with fruit. I listed fabulous examples of my stellar culinary skills as showcased by our household’s typical dinners. I waxed lyrical about oven-roasting pears in cinnamon to spoon over steel cut oats for breakfast.

She was overall pleased. She did however, kindly yet bluntly, remind me to eat more vegetables.

Eat more vegetables? But I love vegetables! Don’t I?

The glass splintered further into tiny shards.

Half a cup of puréed tomato in a curry does not really count towards vegetable intake. Dahl is not a vegetable. Nor is any other lentil or legume. A vegetarian meal, defined only by its lack of animal protein, also does not contribute to your two-and-five if it, well—if it doesn’t even have one vegetable.

I went back to the drawing board and I upped the ante. I did indeed love vegetables already, but I began to seek them out. I voraciously experimented with vegetables and greens rare in my upbringing. Brussels sprouts. Turnips. Kale. Edamame. Beetroot. I began keeping a cucumber, lemon and bag of spinach in the fridge at all times for a makeshift side salad that works across cuisines. In addition to Meal Prep Sunday I went along with Meatless Monday. My most common refrain at dinner time became ‘And what about the vegetables?’.

Through this, I continued to join my parents for dinner at least once a week. Now with an additional tiny human to feed, my mother’s kitchen was not immune to my vegetable foraging.

Finally, one day she’d had enough. She retorted, “What? Why always with the vegetables? Have we suddenly become white Australians have we? With our meat and three veg, meat and three veg, meat and three veg?!”

I tried not to be as offended as she looked.

“No, Mum, it’s just… the Mediterranean diet. And you know, ‘get your two-and-five’. Vegetables should be the main component of our evening meal.”

My mother—a General Practitioner who gives health advice for a living and helped me personally lose 25 kilograms to reach a healthy weight, a woman who exercises every single day, who is still one of the best cooks I know—simply looked at me.

“The Mediterranean diet…” she began.

I could see the glass shattering.