Khalil Akhtar Khalil Akhtar is a Canadian journalist, broadcaster, and cooking instructor. Akhtar was born in the United Kingdom to a Punjabi family and grew up in small-town Atlantic Canada. He has spent two decades working in radio newsrooms across the country. He is the host of CBC Radio’s Information Morning in Moncton, New Brunswick, and a past co-host of CBC’s On the Island in British Columbia. He created and hosted the CBC summer radio program The Main Ingredient and developed a long-running syndicated food column that aired on CBC morning shows across the country.
How to Eat with Your Hands is his first book.
Our parents or grandparents had dishes that lived in the very walls of the kitchen. One meal spoke to the next. The same ingredients could be bent to dozens of different whims. This is a book about cooking at home — the labour of it, but also the pleasure.
“Whether you’re preparing thirty-plus ingredient haleem, chopping green mangoes right through their pits for achar, or mixing flour and water for humble daily rotis, Akhtar’s is the voice you want with you in the kitchen. Capable, thoughtful, passionate. This is food writing at its best.”
—BONNY REICHERT, author of How to Share an Egg
“In How to Eat with Your Hands, the kitchen is more than a place to prep meals—it is a sanctuary of ‘dying light’ and ‘pillowy forts,’ where a messy stovetop becomes a sign of a life well-lived. Khalil Akhtar explores ‘the inheritance’ of the kitchen through the daily rhythms of peeling potatoes, rolling rotis, and tending simmering pots.”
—NIK SHARMA, author of The Fundamentals of Flavor
“This is as beautiful, lyrical, insightful, and above all else as delicious a cookbook as you’ll ever find. How to Eat with Your Hands puts Akhtar among the absolute greats.”
—CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH, author of Cook It Wild