Monday

Discovery of the day: Indian food... Hmmm...

I have a new wild hair: I want to include some Indian recipes in my repertoire. I am very fond of Indian food and we're lucky to have one decent restaurant in our area. But I've never really cooked Indian. Sure, I have one vaguely curry-ish recipe that I tried (unsuccessfully) to adapt, but I've decided that I need to get 'real' with it. Or as real as I can get, given my limited patience, short attention span, and decidedly non-Indian background.

Gee, that sounds like an excuse to buy a cookbook! Can't remember if I've mentioned that I've cut way back on my cookbook acquisition. I mean, how many books am I really going to look through for a pesto recipe? Most of the time I end up searching online anyway, especially since there are so many great veg-centric food blogs out there.

But to learn the basics of Indian food I think I need a book. I tried to do some research online but some of the ingredients are kicking my butt. The types of dal alone have me horribly confused: Urad dal, for example, seem to be like black lentils but they apparently aren't true black lentils, and BTW, sometimes they're white.

What's a white girl to do?

I need a book about good, quasi-authentic, vegetarian Indian food written for clueless Americans. Time to hit Amazon.com!

Eventually I found a couple of promising books, both with a nice number of good reviews, that look like they'll fit the bill. Now I just have to pick one.

So stay tuned. This could be fun! And who knows? I may get inspired enough to start a new cook-through blog to add to my own Cooking the Books blog.