Cooking from Vidhu Mittal’s Pure & Simple

This is not a book review, just want to share a great cookbook with my fellow foodies. I spotted this book at a friend’s place. A hurried browsing (which is all my toddler allows me) made me feel that there’s plenty I can cook from this book. I’m by no means a recipe follower, always making substitutions to make things simpler, healthier and easier – and cooking with what’s on hand. Vidhu’s recipes fit in all the above criteria – they are simple, they are reasonably healthy and do not ask for any exotic ingredients. She says in the preface that most of her recipes have the Uttar Pradesh influence, and I quite like that. Small tweaks like adding gram flour to oil before throwing in capsicum and potato in the Capsicum Potato curry give a whole new taste to a daily curry

While I like books written by people like Jamie Oliver, vegetarian cookbooks like these allow me to try out any recipe without any exclusions. My favourite sections here were the Main Course and the last section that teaches how to make basic stuff like paneer, gravies and such. The fact that Vidhu has been a cookery teacher is very evident in these simple, no-nonsense tips and fixes

Every single thing I’ve tried from this book has turned out excellent

What I’ve tried so far –

Ridge gourd lemon flavoured

Curried rajma beans

Calabash parathas

Masala Paneer

Capsicum potato curry

The photography by Sanjay Ramachandran is truly wonderful. Every recipe comes with step-wise pictures that make it really helpful to new cooks who would like to have an idea how things are going to look in various stages of cooking

I would heartily recommend this book to all food lovers – Indian and otherwise. This is a great gift to give your non-Indian ‘curry-loving’ friends as an introduction to simple Indian cooking at home

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