A handy cook book (India's Vegetarian Cooking - Monisha Bharadwaj)

Member Name: kiran8

Product:	India's Vegetarian Cooking - Monisha Bharadwaj
Date:	29/08/08 (94 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tasty recipes and simple preparations...

Disadvantages: not much variety...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author MONISHA BARADWAJ had a successful career as a Food consultant with the TIMES INDIA GROUP OF COMPANIES, which was incidentally her first job after completing a Hotel Management degree at Mumbai....
She moved to UK in the early nineties and started teaching Indian cookery and later started appearing on TV cookery shows....
She wrote her first book INDIAN KITCHENS in 1998, which gave a good amount of useful information regarding Indian recipes and the ingredients needed including other food related information...the book was well received which encouraged her to write more on the subject...

Since then she has written 4 more cook books and this book INDIA'S VEGETARIAN COOKING was written in 2006....

Monisha is actively involved in many cookery programmes shown on the TV and does demonstrations inside and outside UK..
She is a trained Indian Classical Dancer, and along with her passion for food she also teaches Indian Classical Dances...

ABOUT THE BOOK

A majority of Indians are vegetarians and with India being such a vast country with many different cultures and food habits, one comes across a wide variety of dishes that are totally different ...many a time one comes across the same dish being cooked differently in different parts and regions of India....

India has a staple diet of Rice in the Southern , Eastern and North eastern parts....and Rotis , chapatis and naans are the staple food in northern parts of India and the central India....

The most common side dish or curry that one comes across is the DHAL, which is lentils cooked in a gravy form, with an addition of fresh green chillies, turmeric, tomatoes and some spices....There are a few dozen varieties of cooking Dhal in various parts of India...
In this book Monisha has covered a good range of this particular dish...covering the different variety of Dhals, and different recipes made with them, There is DHAL FRY which is a more commom dish and MOONG DHAL (Split Green gram) which is quite a nice recipe, and the URAD DHAL(split Black Gram dhal) which is one of my favourite recipes and RAAJMAH (Red Kidney beans) which is another great recipe here....

There are other dishes and snacks which are simple in preparation without too many spices and hazzles...quite wholesome and tasty food...
There are a few Rice preparations too, but nothing exciting, i would go for the vegetable side dishes..
There are some desserts made with Dhals and Vegetables...

This book is not her best....She has repeated many of the recipes from her previous books and run out of ideas ...
She could have included more recipes from BENGAL and other generally neglected regions like ASSAM and ORISSA which has a good deal of great tasting vegetarian recipes...

But the dishes themselves are all tasty, just that there could have been a little more variety instead of being picked from a few regions only....The photographs are adequate and quite nice....

It is not a bad buy at all for someone interested in making simple wholesome Indian vegetable dishes...

PRODUCT DETAILS

Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Kyle Cathie (20 April 2006)
Language English
Product Dimensions: 25.8 x 23 x 2.2 cm

Summary: Quite useful for vegetarian food lovers...