Review by Booklist Review
London-based Anand (Indian Food Made Easy, 2012) explains that by birth she's a meat and vegan lover but by marriage a strict vegetarian. She eschews the fanaticism often associated with this kind of eating and instead promotes the flavorful and the exotic. Many of her recipes require unusual ingredients, hence there's a few early pages on stocking a pantry with beans, spices, grains, nuts, and seeds. Every one of her more than 100 dishes, each augmented by at least one color photograph, entices, including beet minicakes with radish and yogurt chutney, smoky spiced eggplants, spiced cottage pie, best-ever Bombay potatoes, and pomegranate souffles with rose and raspberry cream. For those unfamiliar with Indian cuisine, she prompts and coaxes via sidebars (e.g., on how to prepare an artichoke and how to make paneer, the unsalted, crumbly white Indian cheese) and the recipe prefaces. As an example of her comments in the prefaces, there's this about delicate korma with cashews and apricots: This is lovely and creamy but light enough so as not to overpower the vegetables, which stand proud. Korma was created for the Moghul palaces, using the most expensive ingredients of the time: nuts, cream, saffron, and dried fruit. . . . If you don't have any saffron, leave it out; the sauce will be less aromatic, but still lovely. --Jacobs, Barbara Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Cooking without meat in no way means cooking without flavor and in her sixth volume, BBC host Anand (Indian Food Made Easy) concentrates on sensible vegetarian dishes. A London resident who visits Delhi and Calcutta regularly, Anand prepares mostly vegetarian foods for her husband and children, here offering ideas for meals throughout the day that privilege herbs, spices, rice, beans, and whole grains. Her "desert island ingredient would be humble Bengal gram (chana dal), a type of lentil," she says. Highly versatile, "it can be made into a curry, stir-fried with spices into a protein-rich side dish, even used to make a dessert." Anand combines yellow lentils with ginger and chilies to create "fluffy, spongy, savory" steamed lentil cakes, served in a spicy rasam broth. For appetizers, she makes tandoori baby potatoes-twice-cooked potatoes with cumin, garam masala, coriander, and paprika-and tops them with herbed yogurt. To griddled zucchini carpaccio, she adds an Indian-inspired chickpea salsa "based upon a roadside chaat," drizzles pistachio dressing and scatters feta cheese. That none of the recipes appears excessive or inaccessible is a testament to Anand's ability to simplify ingredients and techniques, while Emma Lee's bright, evocative images add extra class to the presentation. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
