Amma's Cookbook

Amma (mother) is an Indian housewife and grandmother who began posting recipes for her children on the Internet when they moved overseas and missed her cooking. From this simple beginning in 1996, Ammas.com has grown to be the world's largest and most successful Asian food and lifestyle Web site, audited at more than 2 million hits per month. Demand for a cookbook from site users has led to this superb collection of genuine Indian recipes adapted for international use. These include traditional vegetarian, chicken, lamb, and game dishes, vegetables, dals, rices, breads, and seafood. Let Amma introduce you to crayfish in a creamy curry, stuffed eggplant, golden fried coconut rice, cashew nut curry, and other exquisite new dishes and exotic flavors you can create at home. Recipes are presented in easy-to-follow steps, with explanations of Indian spices, flavorings, and cooking techniques, and every dish is photographed in color. Amma also provides delightful anecdotes of Indian village life, which convey the warmth, love, and traditional values of her upbringing. Not a book for chefs, full of recipes you might find in an Indian restaurant, instead Amma offers recipes for cooks, with food from a mother's kitchen. A dish I associate with the towering clouds and pounding rain of the monsoon, my mother's minced lamb curry was unique in our village. All the other women cooked this dish as they would any other meat curry. But Amma added a few eggs, which poached in the heat of the frying pan. The aroma of the lamb would mix with the tenderly cooked eggs. . . . Memory also serves a dab of butter, some yogurt, and a large spoon-ful of lightly cooked vegetables with these monsoon-enriched meals. --from Amma's Cookbook Amma is the pseudonym for a southern Indian housewife who wishes to remain anonymous, but who is known through her Web site to millions.