Zareen’s Pakistani Kitchen

INTRODUCTION

Dear Reader,
 
This cookbook is a food crawl down memory lane, with easy-to-follow directions. It features the most popular dishes from Zareen’s, our award-winning California-based restaurants, and our favorite homemade meals and street fare from our childhoods in Pakistan. We hope to share our knowledge, nostalgia, and the joy of great Pakistani food with you, the American home cook. The success of Zareen’s restaurants lies in making Pakistani food accessible to American palates without compromising on authenticity. We hope to do the same with our cookbook. 

Our motivations in writing this cookbook are threefold. First, we want to instruct home cooks toward a mastery of Pakistani cooking. Second, we want to share a nostalgic ode to the food of our childhoods. Third, we hope to inspire our readers to support our mission of women’s empowerment which is at the heart of our restaurant and all related endeavors. 

Sharing Our Knowledge
All cookbooks aim to teach. The good ones make the learning process undaunting. Given the perceived complexity of South Asian cooking, approachability was priority number one for us. So we shaped our recipes with easy to follow steps, generally available ingredients, and a close eye on preparation time. Having run cooking classes and restaurants, we also thoroughly kitchen-tested our recipes so you won’t find untested measurements that lead to underwhelming meals. 

Given the incredible diversity of South Asian cooking, we curated our recipe selection to include the most popular dishes from thousands of Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi specialties and staples. We chose some dishes American home cooks might already know from their favorite Indian and Pakistani restaurants. We also included some South Asian street foods that have become popular thanks to social media. 

We hope you will find here authentic Pakistani recipes made accessible to American home cooks. 

Sharing Our Nostalgia
A good cookbook is more than a manual. Like any beloved book, it is a communion between writer and reader. Through evocative descriptions and photographs, we want to convey our passion for Pakistani cuisine to you. We want to share our nostalgia for the foods of our childhoods with all our readers: from the children of South Asian diaspora eager to learn the culinary heritage of their parents and grandparents to American home cooks exploring the mouthwatering flavors of South Asian cooking. 

Zareen’s fan base is not restricted to South Asian foodies but spans all cultural, religious, and ethnic groups. We hope our cookbook is a trip down memory lane not just for South Asians, but for all our readers. 

Sharing Our Mission
Finally, we want to give our readers a taste of our mission of supporting and celebrating women’s empowerment. We see Zareen’s restaurants as a vehicle for this mission. Our eclectic decor highlights trailblazing women: from our commissioned murals from local NorCal artists like Noopur Goel, to our featured artwork by Pakistani women artists and illustrators such as Shehzil Malik and Eemaan Bano a.k.a. Beygumbano, to our “wall of cartoons.” And the majority of our giving is to women’s charities in America, Asia, and Africa. 

We see our cookbook as an essential extension of this mission. And so, interspersed among our own stories and recipes you’ll find spotlights on a few remarkable women we love and admire. In these spotlights, they share the stories of their work and impact, and name a favorite charity that we will support through this book: 
--Nadiya Hussain chef, TV personality, author, and winner of The Great British Bake Off in 2015—Charity: WaterAid, UK 
--Michelle Tam food activist and creator of Nom Nom Paleo—Charity: The Women’s Building, San Francisco 
--Stacy Brown-Philpot business leader and former CEO of TaskRabbit—Charity: Planned Parenthood, USA 
--Ayesha Chundrigar animal activist and CEO of ACF Animal Rescue—Charity: ACF Animal Rescue, Pakistan 
--Rupi Kaur poet, artist, and author of Milk and Honey and The Sun and Her Flowers—Charity: Khalsa Aid, UK 

We hope these stories inspire more women toward entrepreneurship and activism. And since we will donate half of our earnings from the sales of this cookbook to their chosen charities, you, dear reader, have our gratitude for supporting their causes and our mission. 

Above all, we thank you for reading our work. It was pure joy to write this book for you—unaided by ghost writers human or virtual. We hope you and your loved ones find joy in these recipes from our well-fed childhoods. 

In health, 
Zareen Khan and Umair Khan