The Everything Indian Cookbook: 300 Tantalizing Recipes Reviewed by Ruth Paget
Monica Bhide’s The Everything India Cookbook: 300 Tantalizing Recipes helped me solidify the knowledge I have gained about Indian from eating in Indian restaurants and preparing several dishes at home over a few decades.
Bhide writes that Indian cooking has six tastes that cooks try to achieve when putting together a meal. These six tastes follow:
-sweet
-sour
-salty
-spicy
-bitter
-astringent
These flavors are often brought into a meal with a variety of condiments.
Bhide further writes that spices distinguish Indian cuisine from others. Indians have a specific spicing order when cooking that promotes flavor and gut health, which follows:
-whole spices
-herbs
-powdered spices
Spice powders are made from dry roasted whole spices that are ground and kept in air-tight jars in dark places.
Thickening agents for cooking include:
-yogurt
-chickpea flour
-onions
-nut pastes
Bhide cites Indian Ayurvedic traditional medicine when she writes that ancient texts promote the use of spices for the following reasons:
-medicinal properties
-ability to act as food preservers
-healing
The 300 recipes in The Everyday Indian Cookbook are well written and invite Indian food lovers to try cooking some of their favorite restaurant foods.
Some of the recipes that I think are particularly good for cooking after a farmers’ market visit include:
-Indian paneer – cheese made with milk, lemon juice, and cheese cloth from draining
-spinach soup
-Indian-style coleslaw
-potato and yogurt salad
-Maharastrian cabbage salad
-shredded carrot salad
The Everything Indian Cookbook: 300 Tantalizing Recipes by Monica Bhide is enjoyable to read and cook from.
Novice cooks and Indian restaurant habitués can all find tasty recipes to try in The Everything Indian Cookbook – an absolute great reference cookbook for the kitchen bookshelf or Kindle library.
Note: In Salinas (California) you can eat Indian food at Avatar Indian Grill, In Monterey, (California) Ambrosia has two locations. Ambrosia also has a location in Los Gatos outside San Jose, California.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France and developer of the Novgorod and Bento War Games
