EXOTIC DELIGHTS - Spicy Indian Model Cooks in Her Lingerie (Padma Lakshmi - Easy Exotic : A Model's Low-Fat Recipes from Around the World)

Member Name: beoram

Product:	Padma Lakshmi - Easy Exotic : A Model's Low-Fat Recipes from Around the World
Date:	24/11/01 (1125 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: easy-to-make delicious recipes from around the world, complete with photos of the beautiful model/actress Padma Lakshmi, Padma Lakshmi is Salman Rushdie's current girlfriend (I don't know if this is really an advantage, but it makes the book more interesting)

Disadvantages: too few photos of Padma Lakshmi

EASY EXOTIC contains recipes for both meat and vegetarian dishes from a variety of cultures--Spain, France, Italy, India, East Asia, Morocco (as well as a separate dessert section)--which are easy to prepare and wonderful to eat.

It is not a 'diet' cookery-book, but rather simply a healthy one. As the author states: '[n]o-one ever sticks to diets, because the often take away the pleasure of flavour...[These recipes are] "happy medium" food...it is not gravely fattening because it avoids things like cream and butter. What I will not do is eat food that does not taste good'. The book does provide a listing of the amount of calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates, cholesterol and sodium along with each recipe for those who are concerned with these things.

A sampling of dishes includes: Stuffed Bell Peppers (Spain), Sautéed Steak in Red Wine & Shallot Sauce (France), Fiery Farfalle (Italy), Tandoori Chicken Salad (India), Vegetarian Chili (India), Bali Baked Fish (Asia), Wild Mushroom Couscous (Morocco), Poached Pears with Raspberry Sauce (dessert), as well as numerous other exotic delights.

Another lovely addition to the book are the short passages at the beginning of each section and interspersed throughout in which the author recalls her time living in Spain, Italy, India, &c. The one leading the section on French dishes begins: 'Each of us has a charmed part of our lives we remember with nostalgia as a carefree and idealistic time. For me it is when I was in Paris that cold winter of my first year as a model....' and concludes, 'There were all sorts of discoveries, small and large, that I made on a weekly basis. Soon I began to know my way around Paris and my way around modelling as well. I can hear Tom Waits in the background and the sound of [my friend] chopping the onions as I slam the door on another day's round of casting'.

*****

A non-culinary exotic delight of EASY E
XOTIC is the inclusion of a number of photographs (though, alas! too few to my mind) of the author herself--the breathtaking model/actress Padma Lakshmi--cooking and shopping in outdoor markets.

Notably, Miss Lakshmi is also the current girlfriend of the Booker-Award-winning author Salman Rushdie, and is, in fact, transparently the model for one of the character in his latest novel, FURY [see my review of this book]. This character, Neela Mahendra, is described in FURY as 'the most beautiful Indian woman--the most beautiful _woman_--he had ever seen. Compared to the intoxicating effect of her presence, the bottle of Dos Equis in his left hand was wholly alcohol free. Other women in the world were just under six feet tall, with waist-length black hair, he supposed; and no doubt such smoky eyes were also to be found elsewhere, as also other lips as richly cushioned, other necks as slender, other legs as interminably long. On other women, too, there might be breasts like these. So what?....Staring into the sidereal unreality of her beauty, which wheeled in the room like a galaxy on fire, he was thinking that if he had been able to wish his ideal woman into being, if he'd had a magic lamp to rub, this would have been what he'd have wished for'. This poetic description may almost do her justice.

My one complaint about EASY EXOTIC (other than wishing for more photos) is that someone [the publishers?] seems to have felt compelled to have the scar on Padma Lakshmi's right arm airbrushed-out. I find this unfortunately, for, as Rushdie says of Neela Mahendra in FURY (who has a scar to match Padma's): 'down the upper part of the woman's right arm there was an eight-inch-long herringbone-pattern scar....[that] made her more beautiful, that perfected her beauty by adding an essential imperfection. By showing that she could be injured, that such astonishing loveliness could be broken in an instant, the cicatrice only emphasised
what was there, and made one cherish it....all the more'.

All in all, an excellent book of delicious recipes which are not too fattening or difficult to make, complemented by photographs of the astonishingly beautiful author; made all the more interesting for the fact that Padma Lakshmi provided the inspiration for a main protagonist in a novel by Salman Rushdie, arguably the world's greatest living novelist. However, the recipes alone in EASY EXOTIC are well worth the price of the book.

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