When you consider all the recipe books and foodie shows on TV, you’d think there isn’t any space left for other platforms. You’d be wrong: my Twitter feed contains dozens of articles, photos and recipes about food. There are gourmet destinations where you can go and pig out on delicacies. And there are all kinds of promotions for learning every cuisine under the sun.

Against this background, when Asad Memon, my son Shakir’s colleague, came up with the idea of producing a cooking programme on the internet, I was a bit sceptical. Not wishing to discourage him, I gave him a few ideas without really understanding what he was trying to achieve. Luckily, he binned my suggestions and proceeded to do his own thing, and making a big success of it.

If you go to Youtube.com/foodfusionpk (or Facebook.com/foodfusionpk), you’ll see what I mean. This is a simple, elegant site full of recipes illustrated through a series of images that take you from start to finish for a large number of dishes. You just see the hands of the cook in action without being distracted by a lot of patter. Ingredients are identified, and go into the pan in quick succession, and the final dish is shown at the end, beautifully plated.

With more and more recipes available online, home-cooked food may regain popularity

Apparently, each recipe gets hundreds of thousands of hits, and many people leave comments on how a recipe worked for them. And as there are often several variations of many recipes, some disgruntled amateur cooks insist their version is the only authentic one. So there’s lots of interaction.

Asad works with his wife Samia on his fledgling enterprise, and they have created a small kitchen in their apartment with a couple of cameras. The young couple have already roped in a few corporate sponsors who advertise on his site, and I’m sure they will go from strength to strength.

To atone for my earlier doubts, I volunteered to cook a dish, and earlier suggested karrhai masalay ke butair (quail in whole spices). But Asad pointed out that his viewers would be more comfortable with more easily available ingredients, so we compromised on chicken.

Readers will no doubt be familiar with the whole-spice technique: cumin, coriander, cardamom, cinnamon, whole dried chillies, cloves and pepper corns go in after the onions, garlic and ginger have been cooked till they are soft.

The meat goes in next and is sautéed for a bit. Yoghurt and salt are added and everything simmers until the meat is cooked. A couple of weeks ago, I cooked some venison this way, and the dish was judged to be a success.

If it’s so easy, you think, it would be simple to do in Asad’s studio. Ah, but there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip. In this case, the size of the spoon measures tripped me up as they were smaller than any I had come across.

Normally, I chuck in the spices using the palm of my hand to estimate the quantities. But here, everything had to be precise, so I ended up using less spices than I normally would. I can hear you saying that a bad carpenter always blames his tools. But luckily we managed to sort out the problem, and the recipe you will see on the website has been duly corrected.

Is this the way forward for home cooking? In England, surveys show that despite the huge popularity of food programmes and expensive recipe books, fewer people are actually cooking at home. Those who prefer the ease of going to eat fast food pay for their laziness in the form of obese children and the growing number of diabetics now signing up for treatment.

So I’m delighted with any initiative that puts people back into the kitchen, cooking healthy and delicious food.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, November 13th, 2016