Ginger and Ganesh: adventures in Indian cooking, culture and love

Description

The ad -- Waiting for ganesh -- Vishnu of suburbia -- Krishna and curry leaves -- Bollywood and bitter melon -- Sour tamarind and sweet talk -- Days of shrines and dosas -- Whine chicken -- Spice, spice baby -- Saris and saffron -- Diary of a masala junky -- Bhindi and brown eyes -- Spices, with benefits -- The Keralan tea and fresh coconuts -- Viennese days and Gujurati nights -- Chaat rooms and comfort zones -- Radha and tamarind tales -- Peace and pakoras -- Getting started : the basics of Indian cooking.;"Please teach me Indian cooking! I will bring ingredients and pay you for your trouble. I would like to know about your culture as well." And with this posting on Craigslist, so begins Nani Power's journey to learn traditional Indian cooking in the most ancient of ways -- woman to woman. Welcomed warmly into the homes of strangers, Power meets women of all ages and backgrounds, and from them learns the skills that were passed on to them from their own mothers. Power takes the reader into a culture, a cuisine, and the female psyche, with recipes and stories from each chapter revealing the struggle of modern women, both American and of Indian descent, searching for identity and a definition of what it means to be a woman today. The recipes shared in this collection are far from ordinary; they are treasured family recipes from vegetarian homes in India -- from homemade cheese cubes in a rich cilantro and almond curry to coconut-stuffed okra and luscious potato-curry dumplings. Power's recipes and stories pave the road to understanding a culture that is at the same time ancient and so very much part of our modern world.