From India’s Vegetarian Cooking: Spiced Turnips

Turnips are not one of the first vegetables most Americans would think of when they think about Indian food. Turnips are a cold weather root vegetable which I always think of as a staple of the winter kitchen.
Winter is not a season that I generally associate with India.
Of course that is silly and […]

From India’s Vegetarian Cooking: Broccoli with Cumin and Garlic

One of the barriers many Americans have to trying to learn to cook Indian food is the feeling that it is too complex, difficult and requires way too many ingredients, especially spices.
That many Indian recipes require more than five or six spices or aromatics is sometimes true. That there are unfamiliar techniques involved in Indian […]

Book Review: India’s Vegetarian Cooking

Reading cookbooks brings no small amount of pleasure to me; the best, however, broaden my knowledge not only of food and culinary arts, but also of culture, geography and humanity.
Monisha Bharadwaj’s Indian Vegetarian Cooking: A Regional Guide is one such book. Curling up to read it is not only a second-hand gustatory joy, it […]

Cookbook Review: Food Adventures

Kat is just a few days shy of her six-month birthday, and her new pediatrician, after hearing how the wee tenacious one has been dive-bombing after my toast every morning, has given us the all-clear to start her on solids. In the US, that means giving her rice cereal, which is deemed the most harmless […]

My Favorite Chinese Cookbooks For Beginners–In No Particular Order

People often ask me what my favorite Chinese cookbook is, and I never can give a simple answer. For one thing, I collect them, and have well over a hundred different titles at this point, some of them brand new, in-print books, and others out of print, some of them even vanishingly rare.
For another […]