Customer Reviews

From Mom with Love - A Complete Guide to Indian Cooking and Entertaining

5 star:		(64)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I purchased this cookbook about 8 months ago. I wanted to really give it a workout before writing a review. I'm a born and raised American who married a born and raised East Indian. My husband is a doll, but having been one of the fortunate few to have grown up in a wealthy Indian home, he was provided only the best meals and is extremely picky with food. So much so that his mother even warned me about it.

I have quite a few Indian cookbooks, my favorites being this one, "Quick and Easy Indian Cooking" by Mahur Jaffrey and "5 Spices, 50 Dishes" by Ruhta Kahate. Madhur Jaffrey and Rutha Kahate are both fabulous cooks and have some great recipes, but my husbands biggest complaints about both of their cookbooks is that many of the recipes are too mild or are "Americanized" Indian dishes. (The spice issue is easy to work with, I just double the chili powder or add additional green chilies.) So while the meals in both of those cookbooks are really great tasting food, my Gujarati husband was looking for the EXACT SAME taste he would get at home in every recipe of the book. (EEEK!)

I read the great reviews on this book and decided to purchase it even though it didn't have anything about "simple" or "easy" in the title. I really think Mahur Jaffrey and Rutha Kahate both introduced me to Indian style cooking and helped me get past that initial fear of all the spices, taking me from beginner to intermediate. Both are really great books and I highly recommend them for beginners.

Well, this is THE BOOK!! From meal one, this cookbook was a huge hit with my husband! I don't consider myself a naturally good cook, but this book is absolutely fabulous at guiding you every step of the way. Each recipe has a full color photo and they are non-intimidating. Most meals take under an hour and some are 30 minutes or so, including cooking time. Even the more complicated looking dishes aren't that bad. I did as suggested and pre-cooked and froze masala for use in later recipes and it's worked out great. My husband's favorite is the Tandoori chicken, which looks scary, but it's really not! Once you have all of the spices required it's a little time consuming but a snap.

The taste of the food is not really going to be much like you'd find in Indian Restaurants here in the US, it's actually better, more flavorful. Much more of a home cooked Indian meal you can only find either at the home of an NRI or in India itself. I have been fortunate enough to go to India and these meals are exactly like what I was served at the gracious homes of my husband's friends and family.

My husband often tells me the meals I make from this book are sometimes even better than what he eats at home. He credits this to the fact that (he thinks) I follow every single step to the letter, while his mother sometimes skips spices. (Critical, critical! She's a fabulous cook!!) But either way it is possible to (shhhh!) take a few shortcuts with this book. I don't always grind my coriander fresh (something I learned from Madhur Jaffrey) and will use coriander powder instead. I also get lazy and use garlic or ginger paste instead of messing with the real thing. The taste is still fabulous, and several of the recipes call for garlic or ginger paste anyway.

In order to cook most of the great Indian meals from this book, you really only need a few essential tools, some of which you probably already have. A food processor, a blender and a spice grinder. A pressure cooker helps but I don't remember if any of these recipes require one. There are usually alternate directions if you don't have one anyway.

If you are new to the idea of Indian cooking but really want to produce that authentic, home cooked Indian taste, GET THIS BOOK! It's NOT scary. Trust me, I'm not a natural in the kitchen. I'm easily intimidated and was delighted to find I could cook any recipe in this book to perfection. If you're absolutely new at this, just be prepared to blow at least $30.00 on some base spices right off the bat and be SURE to get a spice grinder.

The Indian ingredients I always keep in stock in my kitchen are as follows:

Amchur (Mango) Powder
Afoetida
Bay Leaves
Black Pepper (Whole)
Black Cardamon Pods
Black Mustard Seeds
Cinnamon Sticks
Cloves
Coriander Seeds
Coriander Powder
Cumin Seeds
Chili Powder
Fenugreek Seeds
Fennel Seeds
Garam Masala
Garlic Paste
Ginger Paste
Green Cardamon Pods
Green Chili's (Serrano Peppers)
Lemon Juice
Mustard Oil
Onions
Saffron
Tumeric
Urad Dahl
Vegetable Oil

I realize that is an extensive list and no one should just go out and buy all of those spices without several recipes to use them in. Also, keep in mind it was built up over time and I also cook Indian food at least 5 times a week. If I had to pick the five spices I use the most, it would be Coriander Powder, Tumeric, Chili Powder, Cumin and Garam Masala. These are very basic for most Indian dishes. I'd say the best way to do it is build as you go. Pick 4 or 5 recipes you'd like to cook, make a list and go from there. Your spice cabinet will build up over time.

Anyway, this is a fabulous cookbook for non-intimidating and fairly easy to prepare authentic Indian dishes. Don't let the spices scare you, it's not bad at all! Hope this helps!

I have over 10 cookbooks in my pantry that claim to be the 'best' Indian cookbooks around. So, skeptical of adding yet another book to an already overcrowded shelf of unused cookbooks, I made the purchase...mainly becuase the pictures and recipes just looked so delicious...and my strong desire to have good home-made Indian food. When I tried out a recipe...I noticed that the directions were easy to follow and were accurate (in my experience, Indian cookbooks are not accurate about all the ingredients necessary or the amounts or even the preparation times)! To my surprise, my dishes turned out just as the book described (unlike the results I got from some of those other cookbooks in my pantry). This book has given me confidence that I can actually cook Indian food...successfully. I especially like the recommendation at the beginning of the book that tells you the essential spices to have in your pantry. I hope Pushpa Bhargava will consider writing a Vol. 2!

The `Complete Guide to Indian Cooking & Entertaining `From Mom with Love' by Pushpa Bhargava has everything I ever wanted to know how to make. It contains all those mouthwatering dishes you order at the restaurants and many more which I was not familiar with but sound so delicious. Being brought up with Punjabi food, I learned how to make the basics of North Indian cooking, now with this cookbook I have been able to make the dishes from the rest of India which I love too.

I had never successfully made a dish with cream, yogurt or spinach before. I recently had a dinner party and I took the plunge and made several dishes without attempting them in advance. I took a big risk by doing that but I really didn't need to worry. Everything turned out great and everybody loved what I had made and was even complimented by two of my guests saying my food tasted better than the restaurants. The combination of spices is perfect and the food tastes even better the following day!!

At the beginning of the book there is a glossary of indian ingredients. Some I had previously only known in Hindi and others I only knew in English. This list helps put it altogether and is particularly important when you go to buy the ingredients.

All the dishes have very simple steps to follow. There is also a website ([...]) which shows you some video clips which makes the instructions clearer still.

I like the fact there is a photograph of nearly all the dishes. They act as a useful guideline just to make sure your dish turns out the same.

Each recipe has a `serving suggestion' so you know which foods and condiments work together and a useful list of `preferred kitchenware'. You have to make sure you have the correct tools before you attempt any dish e.g. you can't really make good idlies without an idli maker.

I love this cookbook so much that I bought it as a gift for my sister-in-law who does not have an Indian background and has never attempted Indian cooking either but truly loves it. As I completely understand, she has not been able to put the book down and has read it cover to cover many times in anticipation of what she will make next. I have had the book much longer and she has now made more of the dishes from the book than I have and has been very very pleased with the results. It just goes to show you that anyone can cook Indian Food when you have a clear instructions in front of you.

So if you enjoy Indian food and cooking too I seriously recommend the `Complete Guide to Indian Cooking & Entertaining `From Mom with Love' by Pushpa Bhargava. You won't be disappointed!


Enjoying Cooking.

Balvinder (New York, USA, previously Coventry, UK)

I purchased this cookbook as a present for my husband who loves Indian food but never learned to cook it. We've now made several recipes (mostly our favorites from Indian restaurants, but also some we were unfamiliar with) and all of them have been delicious. Some recipes are complicated, others less so, but nothing has been beyond our skill.

Standout aspects of this excellent book:
- glossary explaining ingredients
- list of ingredients to have on hand
- list of special equipment needed
- menu suggestions for entertainment
- lassi and homemade paneer recipes
- suggestions for meals that freeze or keep well
- suggestions for recipes

Problem and suggestions:
- The list of ingredients preceding a recipe is not organized in the order of use. She might tell you to heat oil in a pan and then add two or three spices, but those spices will not be the first items on the ingredients list, they might be the 3rd, 4th, and 10th items in the list. To overcome this confusion we've developed two techniques:
1) Read the recipe thoroughly at least twice before starting to cook. If you are accustomed to scanning a recipe and then diving in, don't be tempted to do that with this cookbook.
2) Measure out all the spices ahead of time. We use small dishes and organize the spices as they are used in the recipe. If 3 bay leaves, a stick of cinnamon and a tablespoon of turmeric all go into the pan together, we put those three spices into one bowl and set it aside, and so on for all the spices in the recipe. That way as you are cooking you can grab one bowl that contains all the relevant spices for that area of the recipe. This means you spend less time being confused by the disorganized list of ingredients. (And you can feel like the host of your own Indian cooking show)

I highly recommend this book especially if you have never cooked Indian food before. Don't be intimidated by the long lists of ingredients for each recipe!

I've really enjoyed this cookbook and have made several items from it. What I've cooked has been quite nice tasting. The basic masala (which is used in some other recipes) is delicious and its use is clever and time saving. The butternut squash dish is one of the most fantastic tasting squash recipes I've ever eaten. Her directions for bread-making are clear. Also the reader can take advantage of the author's website to view cooking demonstrations online.

The book has a nice sturdy cover and is easy to use and read in the kitchen.

I do have some suggestions for improvement for the next edition:
* please put the ingredients in order of their use in the recipe. It is really confusing, for example in one lentil recipe, to have the ingredients all jumbled together and then be told at the end "add remaining ingredients," so that one must look through the list and recall which were already put in.
* provide English translations for the dishes in the table of contents to broaden the appeal to those who don't know their Hindi names.
* include an index so that one can locate a particular recipe in the text.
* provide the yields of the recipes. For example, there is a big batch of a basic masala used throughout the book, but the yield is not stated. When I made it, the yield seemed to be approximately 2-1/4 cups.

As a vegetarian and a longtime Indian food enthusiast, I bought "From Mom with love..." last year, and it has since become one of our most dependable and beloved cookbooks.

The book seems to fill a particular void in the market: An Indian home cookbook that is very accessible, personal, fairly thorough, with great recipes, and loaded with the practical tips and bits of helpful information that one tends to wish for in a cookbook but seldom finds. It's like having an experienced guide there with you as you plan and cook. Ms. Bhargava additionally goes the extra distance of maintaining a website with videos of cooking techniques to supplement the content in the book.

Even if you like to experiment as you cook, I've found that this collection serves as a great reference guide of sold, trustworthy standards to work from.

I have a particular pet peeve that many cookbook authors overreach to try to bulk up large volumes (or multiple volumes) with recipes that are rough and unperfected, and that don't flow from the author's heart and benefit from their long-experience in working with them over time. Clearly this was not at all the case with "From Mom with love..." These home-style recipes bear a much-appreciated personal touch. It's been a delightful experience for us working our way through this aptly titled labor of love.

I bought this cookbook after seeing all the rave reviews here. I wanted another Indian cookbook to complement the one I have owned and loved for years (Curried Favors: Family Recipes from South India, by Maya Kaimal Macmillan). I have to say, I have been disappointed by every recipe I have made in this book so far. The recipes are far more complicated than the ones in Curried Favors and require hard-to-find ingredients; the instructions are vague; and the finished products are not nearly as delicious.

Here's an example: last night I made the Chicken Biryani, and two of the listed ingredients (red chili powder and salt) are never mentioned in the recipe itself, so you have no idea when to add them in. In addition, there is a step in which you are told to sauté the chicken "until it is soft" before baking it for 30 minutes. What does that even mean? Chicken becomes less soft as you cook it, not more so. I took a wild guess and sautéed it for 10 minutes, which clearly wasn't what I was supposed to do, because I had to bake it for a full hour before it was cooked through. And then it was just OK; my husband and I found it a little bland. The other recipes I have made have also been a disappointment. The chicken curry, for one, is incredibly watery -- the sauce was the consistency of chicken broth. Yuck.

I'm going to stick with Curried Favors, and recommend that others do the same. It's an amazing book.

My mother gave me Pushpa Bhargava's From Mom with Love... Complete Guide to Indian Cooking & Entertaining as a gift when I visited home for Thanksgiving. Along with serving as an informative and easy-to-follow cookbook, From Mom with Love is an educational tool for learning Hindi and Eastern traditions. Without a doubt, Mrs. Bhargava's book simplifies the tastiest of North and South Indian cuisine, but it would be a shame to ignore the book's other facets. Skimming the Hindi/English glossary is a walk down memory lane; as I read the words aloud to myself, enjoying the language of my youth--"achar" and "chapati", "chhole" and "haldi", "namak" and "palak"--I was reminded of how although Indian cooking is not an innate skill all Indians are born with (thus making Mrs. Bhargava's cookbook invaluable for us American-Born-Confused-Desis), the language has a pull on me as if my parents' voices and their words were typed along the long DNA strands that dictate my phenotype and personality, my general disposition and love for language.

Back to the cookbook. Embracing the challenge to review my first cookbook, I tried two recipes, the Baigan Bhartha (Spicy Roasted Eggplant) and the Fruit Chat (Spicy Fruit Salad). Neither are dishes from my youth, but who was I to try to replicate my mother's cooking? I decided it was best to cook dishes for which I knew no precedent; trying to emulate my mother's cooking is a short road to failure. Each recipe is accompanied by a photograph of what the dish should look like when ready to serve. All the photos in Mrs. Bhargava's book are accessible; none of the photos look so dauntingly gourmet that the reader is put off from even trying to replicate the dish in one's own kitchen. The eggplant was as tasty as the recipe was straight forward. Fruit chat is a basic blending of favorite Indian spices in a bowl of banana, pear, mango, and guava as well as a smattering of vegetables such as cucumber and tomato. A little skeptical about the fruit-vegetable combination sprinkled with sugar and spices, I was taken aback by the fresh cornucopia of flavors I experienced with every mouthful.

Finally, Mrs. Bhargava's tone with which she writes her book is genuinely "with love". The recipes are straight forward and indelicate, yet as an epilogue Mrs. Bhargava provides useful "Tender Loving Care" tips for solving "cooking crises" and even lists age-old "Proven Household Medications" that have been used for hundreds of years and are still used in households today. Finally, Mrs. Bhargava's cookbook offers tips for "Cleaning & Odor Removal" rather than ignoring the fact that western cultures tend to label Indian food as unusually aromatic. Mrs. Bhargava's cookbook is so successfully written as a loving Indian mother to the scores of Indian Americans interested in maintaining Indian culinary tradition, she instead inspires nostalgia among her readers for a time when Indian food just showed up on the dinner table, uncomplicated by thoughts as to which pots and pans, sweet and sour spices, raw or cooked vegetables, are necessary for enjoying a magnificent Indian meal that seemed to come from nothing but love.

I am one of those procrastinators who keep putting things off. Writing this review was one of them. Thanks to a couple of amusing reviews in the last few weeks and some a few months ago, I have gotten over my procrastination and here is mine.

First, my credentials:

I own both editions of Mrs. Bhargava's books. I have been interested in Indian food for a long time but have been occasionally turned off by the inconsistency and sometimes overly rich and spicy Indian food available in restaurants. I have cooked almost every recipe from Mrs. Bhargava's book (some of them many times) and am now confident enough to serve the dishes at some of my most important gatherings.

A lot of wonderful things have already been written by many people about the book. I agree with them and will not repeat them.

Here is why the book appeals to me:

- The warmth with which it is written really comes through
- The methods are simple and following them accurately will almost always lead to very tasty, wholesome and good looking dishes
- I can eat the food every day and feel good about it

Now my other purpose for writing the review:

One or two reviewers write that that the food is "too watery", some of the dishes are "dull" or the yogurt did not turn out as they had expected. One person has complained about the Hindi glossary in the front.

All I can suggest to these people is to follow the instructions to the tee - and based on my extensive personal experience, they will never have to worry about how the dishes turn out.

To the person who complained that the recipes are dull - well may be she/he should keep on going to the Indian restaurants.

And as for the Hindi glossary, honestly, I find it to be a big help when I am "showing off" my newly acquired expertise on Indian food to my friends.

There was one constructive suggestion - listing the ingredients in the order of use. Although, it has not been an issue for me since I measure and arrange the ingredients before I start cooking, I can see that a casual cook may find it slightly inconvenient. I hope Mrs. Bhargava will make this improvement in the next edition.

In the mean time, thanks, "Mom," for this wonderful book. Your "love" certainly comes through!

So far I've made about four recipes from this book. They've been pretty good. I'm giving the food 4 stars as I don't have a lot of experience with Indian food. It may be a generous rating.

I just spent about 20 minutes scaling the recipe for Tahari on P. 114. As somebody noted before, The ingredients are not written in the order that one uses them in this book. I don't know if this is cultural or the author was never taught how to write a recipe. When I see this type of formatting issue with an internet recipe, I immediately dismiss the recipe and move on to another source. I figure, If they don't know how to format a basic recipe, how good can the food be? And what other careless mistakes did they make? In this same recipe that I had to re-read about 50 times (ok that's an exaggeration, maybe 10 times), The black cardamom was left out of the description as to where it should be used. Given the large quantity of spices and ingredients in many of the recipes, this is not a small issue. I'm thinking I should have given it a 3 come to think of it.

Not looking forward to spending an extra 10 minutes re-reading every recipe several times and I don't have time right now to edit the order of the ingredients on every page. Finished venting. I think I've been fair though.