I’m Ankiet, and welcome to Belly Over Mind- a space where I aggregate my food ideas in the form of recipes, as well as feature stories. Whether you’re an amateur cook, a seasoned cook, a trained chef, or just someone who likes to look at food but never cook it, this blog is a great place to brainstorm for ideas. The challenge has always been to make cooking more approachable to a populace that would usually shy away from it, and that is paramount to this blog.

My style has always been to cook good, wholesome meals, as opposed to gimmicky food that will never make its way into our recipe banks. What’s the point of harping on about a food trend that won’t affect us in any way? Why speak about an ingredient that won’t be available to us? Is a really expensive ingredient even worth a second look? Belly Over Mind has the answers.

Belly Over Mind, however, is not a space for restaurant reviews. There are already one too many bloggers, and more established restaurant critics to help you with that.

This blog looked very different before today. It was frighteningly personal, and documented a lot of the learning process that made me who I am. It was a safe space to make mistakes, share wonderful stories with the world, and most importantly, taught me how to spin a narrative around food more intelligently. In time, due to various ‘adult’ reasons, I decided to take a step back from blogging and enter the more seasoned world of publishing.

My time at BBC GoodFood Magazine, however brief, shaped me to better understand the audience I was catering to. It gave me the tools to visualise a platform that would speak about food with a definitive edge, and I am grateful for that. After that, I freelanced with Mumbai Mirror briefly and then began my stint as Assistant Editor of The Eat Post, a food and drinks website that brought magazine-like content to the internet with a superb design sensibility and great recipe ideas. Today at 26, I’m a freelance food writer, a half-decent micro-blogger, an amateur food blogger, and brother to my 19-year old twin sisters.