Indian Vegetarian Feast: Fresh, Simple, Healthy Dishes for Today's Family
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 soufflés 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.” --Barbara Jacobs