Table Of ContentTable of Contents
Title Page
The Ad
Waiting for Ganesh
Vishnu of Suburbia
Krishna and Curry Leaves
MISHTI’S MATTAR PANEER
MISHTI’S SAAM SAVERA
MISHTI’S KADHI WITH DUMPLINGS
MISHTI’S POTATO AND TOMATO CURRY
Bollywood and Bitter Melon
MEENA’S CHAI
MEENA’S MALAI KOFTAS
MEENA’S RAJMA
MISHTI’S JEERA RICE
Sour Tamarind and Sweet Talk
SARA’S KHEER
SARA’S BOTTLE GOURD KOFTAS (GHIA KOFTA)
SARA’S ALOO MATTAR WITH OKRA
SARA’S SOOJI HALWAH
SARA’S PALAK PANEER
Days of Shrines and Dosas
SUCHITA’S TOMATO DAL
SUCHITA’S DOSAS
SUCHITA’S COCONUT CHUTNEY
SUCHITA’S PEANUT CHUTNEY
Whine Chicken
Spice, Spice Baby
JASMIN’S BUTTER PANEER (SHAHI PANEER)
JASMIN’S MATTAR PULAO
Saris and Saffron
UJALA’S CHOLE BHATURE
UJALA’S GOBI FRY (SPICED CAULIFLOWER)
UJALA’S PAU BHAJI
UJALA’S BESAN HALWA
UJALA’S JALFREZI PANEER
Diary of a Masala Junky
Bhindi and Brown Eyes
MIMI’S ALOO GOBI METHI (POTATO AND CAULIFLOWER CURRY,
WITH FENUGREEK)
MIMI’S NAVARATNA KURMA, OR NINE JEWELS (NINE TYPES OF
VEGETABLES COOKED IN A ...
MIMI’S CABBAGE AND COCONUT RICE
MIMI’S BHINDI MASALA
Spices, with Benefits
MISHTI’S PAKORAS
UJALA’S PANEER MASALA
The Keralan Sea and Fresh Coconuts
BANANA CURRY
BEENA’S COCONUT DAL (PARIPPU)
CHITRANNAM (LEMON RICE)
Viennese Days, Gujarati Nights
JAYABEN’S WALNUT-DATE HALVAH WITH RICOTTA
JAYABEN’S TURMERIC PICKLE
SPROUTED MUNG BEAN FRY (MATKI CHI USAL)
MILLET ROTIS
SPICED LASSI
Chaat Rooms and Comfort Zones
SERENA’S KHICHDI
SERENA AND ROHIT’S BHEL PURI
ROHIT’S CORIANDER-MINT CHUTNEY
ROHIT’S TAMARIND CHUTNEY
QUICK PALAK PANEER
Radha and Tamarind Tales
RADHA’S SAMBAR
RADHA’S EGGPLANT IN PEANUT-COCONUT CURRY
Peace and Pakoras
UJALA’S BHATURE
UJALA’S POORI
Getting Started: The Basics of Indian Cooking
GARAM MASALA
CHOLE MASALA
CHAAT MASALA
HOMEMADE GHEE
MASTER RECIPE FOR PANEER
TAMARIND PULP
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright Page
O elephant-faced God, Ganesha, you are served by the attendants of Shiva and
you eat forest apples and blackberries. You are Uma’s son, the destroyer of
sorrows. I bow to the lotus feet of the remover of obstacles.
The Ad
Please Teach Me Indian Vegetarian Cooking! (Northern Va)
I will bring ingredients and pay you $10/hr for your trouble.
I would like to know about your culture as well.
IN A SIMPLE desire to learn Indian cooking hands-on, I placed this ad on
Craigslist not knowing how much it would change my life. I wanted to cook real
Indian food. I didn’t want the sterile environment of a restaurant or the studied
air of a professional teacher. I craved the person-to-person teaching of yesteryear
amidst the homey-ness of a real kitchen. I wanted to learn the art of curries and
chutneys through the senses, not just through the measuring and timing of a cold
cookbook.
You see, I’m not really American, at least in terms of my palate. I seem to be
hard-wired with South Asian taste buds, a person that craves the burn of chilies
and mustard seed, the warm heat of ginger, cumin, and cinnamon, and the
bitterness of asafetida and black salt. I don’t know why. I have been like this as
long as I can remember.
I go to barbecues, picnics, and dinner parties inwardly yawning. I crave the
waft of a fresh masala, the stain of turmeric far beyond the yellow hue it offers
French’s mustard.
So what did I—spice craver, born in the land of bland food—do before this,
during the first part of my life in the casserole-laden, fonduefixing ’60s? What
any reasonable person does: I bought cookbooks and studied them. I ground
stale supermarket cumin seeds and cinnamon sticks, sizzled spice after spice, a
lone voyager for flavor. I wrestled with samosa dough, and ended up eating a lot
of watery, soulless curries and stone-hard samosas. Sigh. Went to restaurants and
visited the steam buffets consisting of endless anonymous brown mixtures. I was
somewhat satisfied (it was better than a burger) and yet, I felt there was
something missing. My palate seemed to insist it was so.
So many things in my life seem to follow this pattern—the search for love and
my vocation, as well. A person exists in a semi-pleased daze of unrecognition,
colorless, for the blind do not know colors. Then, there comes the fateful day
when you are awakened and color bursts in.
Fast forward to now: I am a single woman in my forties who uses Craigslist
for most everything—buying an entertainment center or sofa, meeting up with
fellow salsa dancers, advertising writing classes. One desperate Friday evening I
bought cheap eyelash extensions from a young Korean beauty student, and a
rather bad haircut as well. Once, I traded a homemade apple pie with an
electrician for installing dimmers in my house. His wife, who was eight months
pregnant, was too tired to bake. They came as a couple to my house, where I
greeted them with the wafting smells of sweet apples and cinnamon. The wife,
young and Filipino, sat and chatted with me, while her husband, an American in
a large Redskins jersey, pulled out his tools. But one day, while eating another
tepid version of Aloo Gobi, I finally had a brainstorm and placed the ad.
TO MY COMPLETE shock, my email account was instantly flooded with
responses from every age and from every region. Wading through them—they
ranged from perfect English to unintelligible, from polite to sharp—I managed to
set up a few appointments. They would supply the ingredients and I would just
show up. I was so excited, and still am, every time I stand on the front stoop,
listening to the soft rustling of a stranger unlocking the door. It is somehow both
a great mystery and a profound gift, to be able to enter someone’s house for
food. One surprising thing I found, entering these houses, leaving my shoes at
the door, roasting spices with strangers, laughing, tasting, and sharing their lives,
was that much more than cooking occurred. A certain antique rite, a female
coming-of-age, so to speak, was being reenacted. I was learning to cook in the
most ancient of ways—woman to woman, with all the senses and a great deal of
warmth. I was welcomed like a family member, and taught in the same patient
and loving ways their own mothers had guided them through the years.
This book is about the masala of my own life—my journey resembled the
separate spices of who I am transforming into an intricate blend. I will take the
reader through the doorways of these women, where we lovingly cooked
together and bonded in our cultures. The recipes are not your typical Indian
curry take-out. These are treasured family recipes from vegetarian homes in
India—from Shahi Paneer, a dish of homemade cheese cubes in a rich tomato
and cashew curry, to coconut-stuffed okra, to luscious potato-curry dumplings.
These recipes will be a welcome addition to any Indian aficionado’s
repertoire, as well as a temptation for the average cook seeking to expand his or
her roster of healthy vegetarian foods. They are the well-known comfort foods of
any vegetarian home in India. Ask an Indian about Pau Bhaji, found on
Mumbai’s Chowpatty beach, or the rich, dark chickpea stew with fried bhaure
bread called Chole Bhature, famous in the Punjab, and you’ll see a visceral look
of desperate home-sickness and drool. These foods are the staples of longing and
memory. They are dishes you will make again and again.
Almost imperceptibly, the culture of this rich and varied country slithered into
my life like a sinuous cobra, combining the modern ways of the United States
with the Technicolor of India, while I ate some damn good food. I wanted to
understand the Indian culture and people; and what seemed so enchanting was
that I was constantly being surprised and challenged by how complex—and
contradictory—it can be. While at one time thousands of years old, in another
time it seems jauntily modern, yet where this occurs bewilders me. I have
learned to keep an open mind. Now, after this year of cooking real Indian food, I
realize that the only real way to learn to cook is through the senses and heart. It
turns out that it is the only real way to live and to love, as well.
LET ME TELL you about myself first. I am a completely untraditional, divorced
single mother with two kids; a writer of novels, living hand-to-mouth,
essentially, and yet striving to live a life of meaning and substance. I am also a
great cook, or so “they” say. Actually, before I became a writer, I eked out a
living as a caterer and still occasionally will do so, between books. After a long
day of writing, nothing is more therapeutic for me than cooking. On a weekend,
I am one of those urban trekkers who loves scouting around and digging through
tiny foreign grocers for odd herbs, incense, unusual vegetables. In some sense, it
satisfies my wanderlust in a cheap way—a quick afternoon journey to Thailand
or Guatemala through the stalls of a shop. And on another level, this habit—
albeit temporarily—seems to quell my voracious appetite for sensual adventure,
so glaringly absent in these beige plastic clusters of suburbia where I live.
I am a new growing species in these states—a Disenchanted, Educated,
Single, Boomer, Yearning. Indians call themselves Desis (from a Sanskrit word
meaning “from the country”), so I call women like me DESBYs—Wanna-Be
Desis. We crave the pageantry, tradition, history, connection, and spirituality of
India, yet with our independent, willful, overeducated backgrounds, we would
no doubt explode if seriously involved in such a duty-oriented society. We prefer
to do yoga, meditate, wear a sari, eat dal, and play the role. Indians laugh at our
childlike behavior, but it is actually no laughing matter. Just like the popular
Indian-used term ABCD (American Born Confused Desi), we Desbys are stuck
in between worlds, seeking balance and continuity, while our attention spans are
pretty short and we are very accustomed to our freedom.
I find now after this yearlong cooking frenzy, this spice journey, that I am a
changed person because I was allowed into a sacred circle, into the private center
of a family’s home—the kitchen. I was treated like a guest, a family member,
and a friend eating their food. Being part of their life, chitchatting with a
steaming mug of chai, made me reexamine things in my life beyond food,
concepts that had been unhinged for sometime, floating amorphously in a stew
of indecision and curiosity: love, spirituality, femininity.
This simple yearlong cooking lesson—innocently started as a little two-line ad
on Craigslist because I was frustrated with my lame attempts at Palak Paneer—
taught me a lot more than how to make a killer spinach and cheese curry. It
smashed open my heart, in so many ways. The kindness of the women, the
beauty of the culture, the explosion of flavors, and, curiously, the very physical
act of cooking led me to examine what is beyond all this: the spiritual realm.
ON THIS PATH I met Sri Ganesh. You may be familiar with him: he is the ever-
popular elephant-headed deity, accompanied by a tiny mouse. He has a large
jovial belly, and holds a conch shell. I’m not sure why he in particular ignited my
passion for this culture and beyond, but perhaps it was the fact that his statue
was present the first time I tasted the incendiary potions of India I came to love.
Or maybe, the wisdom and calm that he emanates soothed my world-weary soul,
and he seemed to be a constant reminder—at the doorway of most houses, or in
their altars—that I was on a spiritual path as well as physical. Thus, not only was
this a quest for ginger, the taste of India, but also a search for the essence of this
