From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman and this is good food.

September's here and it's back to the grind.

Even if you haven't spent the last two weeks getting your kids back in a school routine,

there is a certain vibe shift that happens after Labor Day,

a desire to, you know, hunker down,

stay home, and hopefully cook. Here with some inspiration is mother's son duo Jyote and Oyan Mukherjee. In their new book, Heartland Masala, Jota, a cooking teacher with several

thousand students, took care of the recipes.

And Oyan, a musician and writer, included essays providing cultural context,

shedding light on how colonialism, the American immigrant experience, and more have shaped the book's 99 recipes.

Welcome, both of you. Thank you. Thanks so much. We are really pleased to be

here. So Heartline Masala has recipes from many different regions of India, but there is a special

focus on Punjabi and Bengali food. Jotie, could you describe what makes these cuisines distinctive?

So, you know, my husband is from Bengal. I am from Punjab. We met in medical school and studied medicine

together. And then when we got married, I learned Bengali cuisine. I had no idea

of Bengali cuisine when I was growing up, no exposure to it at all. The cuisines in India are so

vastly different depending on which region of India one comes from. I'm from the north and a lot of

the restaurants all over the world, Indian restaurants do serve cuisine from the northern part of

India because it is very rich in curries and that is what is very pleasing to a lot of palettes.

Cuisine from the eastern part of India,

which is where my husband comes from, which is Calcutta,

and I call it Mother Teresa Land because that's where Mother Teresa was.

And it is a totally different cuisine.

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