Good when you're neither Indian nor a Housewife! (An Indian Housewife's Recipe Book - Laxmi Khurana)

Member Name: mogdred

Product:	An Indian Housewife's Recipe Book - Laxmi Khurana
Date:	21/04/09 (216 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, easy to follow recipes, produces good food .

Disadvantages: No photographs of finished food

With a growing interest in cooking and after buying Madhur Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible, this book was recommended to me.

At first sight this book doesn't look very interesting as it's just a small paperback with no photographs inside. It is a fairly cheap book and didn't look all that great but I thought I would give it a try.

The book is written by Laxmi Khurana, who is an Indian housewife living in Britain. It contains a collection of over one hundred recipes from starters to pickles and sweets.

The book starts with an introduction which briefly goes over Utensils and Equipment; Ingredients; Marinating; Dhals; Vegetables; Pickles and Chutneys; Quantities of Ingredients; Preparation and Cooking Times and Serving the Meal.


The book itself is split into eight chapters:

1) Starters

2) Savoury Snacks

3) Meat, Fish and Egg Curries

4) Dhals

5) Vegetable Curries

6) Raitas, Chutneys and Pickles.

7) Miscellaneous (breads, rice etc)

8) Sweets

There is also a short appendix of spice names, giving the Indian name and the English name.

Each recipe is prefaced with a short explanation of the recipe or when it is eaten and what with. The recipes are clearly laid out with simple step by step recipes which are very easy to follow.

The ingredient lists can be long (as with all Indian cooking) but are generally easily available and not intimidating.

One of my favourite recipes from this book is the Vegetable Samosas which are fairly easy to make and taste great. The most difficult part of the Samosa recipe is the pastry as you need to make chapattis and then cut and fold them together to make cones which you then fill with the vegetable mixture. I found that I had to read this part a few times but it is well explained on the whole.

I like this book as it is so simple and easy to read but you can still produce great tasting food. I would have liked some photographs of the food but this is a minor niggle.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Indian food, especially any beginners as it is clear and concise, not to mention cheap.

RRP is £4.99 but Amazon sell it for £3.02 and I'm sure I paid even less than that.

This review is also on ciao.co.uk under my username mogdred1.

Summary: Cheap and cheerful home-made Indian food.