Auckland restaurant chefs share lockdown menus: Sid Sahrawat on slow-cooked pork and soccer with his kids

Last time chef Sid Sahrawat talked home cooking with Canvas it was 2016 and the menu included crayfish. Now he's all about the lockdown slow-cook. Photo / Jason Oxenham

The country's top chefs are confined to their home kitchens. Kim Knight asks what they're cooking. This week, Sid Sahrawat from Cassia, Sidart and Sid at The French Cafe.

It's Zoya's 9th birthday, so we'll be making a chocolate cake, with a bit of banana through it, because that's what she wants. Another thing she loves is burgers so I'm going to make fried chicken burgers and then at night we're going to do a pork belly with Asian slaw.

She is a big fan of pork belly. The one we did three or four days ago, that's her favourite. You need to start the recipe about 30 or 40 hours before because it takes time to cook and set. We cook it in the slow-cooker for four to six hours, covered in the master stock, then you need to set the pork, because it's so fragile and soft. You leave it in the fridge for a day or two and it becomes really nice and solid and then we portion it like a steak and then caramelise it in the oven. With the amount of time we have now, we can do that. It looks and sounds hard but if you plan it a day or two before, it's actually really easy.

When we heard about the lockdown it was a good time to revive the Hospobaby thing [Facebook and Instagram video cooking demonstrations from Sid and his daughter, with cameo appearances from 4-year-old son, Roan]. We've been filming one or two recipes a week ... chicken poke bowls and grilled cheese sandwiches and nachos for lunch, ribs and kimchi or butter chicken or steak tacos.

Sometimes we get a bit stuck for ideas and we always just go to the fridge and forget to look at our pantry. So today I'm going to make koshari, which is an Egyptian dish - rice, pasta, lentils and a few spices and onions. Completely vegetarian and full of proteins. It's a quick dish to make, but using things most of us have at home.

We love different cuisines from all over the globe and that's what we try to do at home. Cook something new, or a different cuisine every day.

You crave all of the dishes from those restaurants that you go to regularly. So places like Apero, Paradise, Masu - there's so many restaurants. Depot. I ate at Lilian before the lockdown, because we finished slightly earlier on the Tuesday. We had octopus and flatbread with chicken liver parfait and there was one more dish ... oh, the lamb ribs. They were so good.

I have been doing most of the cooking at home. I really enjoy it, it's a good way of involving the kids. Chand [business partner and wife] has a lot of paperwork some days.

I like that I'm spending a lot of time with the kids but when you think about the future, it's really uncertain, isn't it? But I really do enjoy sitting down at the dining table seven days a week with them and really getting to know what I haven't known about them in a few months, or studying with them and taking them to the park every day. Playing soccer, playing cricket and basketball. It's nice to spend that one-on-one time with them, 24/7.