Alert! Alert! Food Blog Police! OMG! I don’t have a badge! Ack!

I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since I last wrote about my adventures in South Indian cooking!

Sometime after I wrote that post, I was contacted by the author, Viji Varadarajan, to thank me and to offer advice, if I needed it. Seriously! Since I was still planning that special dinner for our friends who had gotten married like, a year and a half before, I took Viji up on her offer. Wouldn’t you?

I had been cooking out of an earlier edition of Vegetarian Samayal: Delicious Cooking from a Tamil Cuisine and asked Viji for a couple of sample menus that would be appropriate for a small dinner party. This is the menu we finally served that night.

Click if you can’t read it

A total success! The variety of textures and flavors flowed perfectly. Our guests of honor (one of which is from a Tamil family) were duly impressed. Yay!

Over this past year, Viji and I have corresponded via e-mail, and have become rather friendly. She came out with a new edition of Vegetarian Samayal, which I duly bought and have continued to cook from. When she came out with a new edition of one of her first books, Samayal: The Pleasures of South Indian Vegetarian Cooking, she sent me a copy to get my opinion. So, here goes:

I was going to link this with the Amazon.com listing, but they only seem to have the previous edition for sale right now, which is organized differently. Viji went to a lot of trouble to reorganize the sixth edition of Samayal, adding many pictures with the page numbers of the corresponding recipes, and meal plans, so you can put together a complete dinner of complimentary dishes. Which, if you’re a whitebread girl like me, is very nearly indispensable. She did something similar with the new edition of Vegetarian Samayal.

Two other indispensable features of the several books of hers that I own, are 1) the guide to what to do with individual ingredients (If You Have Eggplant You Can Make…); and 2) the pictorial guide to ingredients (what the heck are “drumsticks”?).

Samayal (as are all her cookbooks) is primarily geared to the young person of South Indian extraction, who, in today’s modern hectic world, is more inclined to get take-out than try to cook a meal, but longs for the fresh flavors of Mom’s (or Grandma’s) home cooking. That’s what makes it so attractive to those of us who love Indian food, but are intimidated by the sheer complexity of most cookbooks of the genre. I love the tips and tricks she includes with most of these recipes to make them even quicker (use your microwave!) and suggesting substitutions for some harder to find ingredients.

Personally, I’m substituting okra for anything that lists drumsticks as an ingredient. Sorry, Viji. I guess you just have to grow up eating certain vegetables…:-) But if you love to experiment with ethnic foods and cooking, and you’ve got a decently stocked Asian / Indian grocery nearby, you’ve definitely come to the right place. We love the rasams (soups), the differently flavored rice dishes, and the desserts are to die-for.

If there are any flaws, however, they lie with her copy editor. At least one recipe ends in mid-sentence, and a couple of others neglect to mention what to do with a listed ingredient (although you can figure it out by reading another recipe in the same section).

The new edition of Samayal also comes with a free Ayurvedic booklet discussing the nature of ayurveda and has some recipes from the Kerala region. This is a treat, especially if you’ve had any curiosity about this popular culture of self-purification.

We own over 65 titles of Indian cookbooks, covering just about every regional cuisine. We buy basmati rice at Costco, if that gives you any indication. South Indian (Tamil) cuisine has become my favorite type of Indian food, and MJ and I really enjoy cooking it for ourselves (the closest South Indian cuisine restaurant is an hour’s drive from us). While I haven’t tried every recipe (idlis still intimidate me), I can honestly say that the new editions of Samayal and Vegetarian Samayal by Viji Varadarajan are the go-to books in our library.

That’s the only explanation I can come up with for the way my house looks right now. The pool table is covered with boxes of decorations, boxes of just-arrived gifts waiting to be wrapped, wrapping paper, and lights.

The dining room table is covered in gifts waiting to be wrapped to go out and the contents of care packages waiting to be boxed and shipped. Mailing deadlines? We don’t need no stinking mailing deadlines!

The tree is in its stand, leaning slightly to the left, in the Florida room (what the rest of you might call the sun porch), still unlit, still unadorned. The menorahs and dreidel lights, too. See the first paragraph re: boxes of decorations.

And through it all, MJ has a new morning pattern. Used to be, I’d get up at 5:30 or 6:00, and he’d stay in bed, snoring away, until about 7:30. A couple of weeks ago, I made him get up at 6:00 twice – only twice! – to go with me to the mechanic (once to drop off the car, the other to pick it up again), and now he’s up at freaking 6:00 a.m. every morning! I set a new pattern for him, he says. Damn! How the hell am I supposed to smuggle in his presents and wrap them, now?!? I’m going to have to drive to work again today (instead of taking the MetroRail) and wrap them in the parking garage in the trunk of the car. And he’s taunting me by having my gifts wrapped and sitting off to the side, waiting for the tree. Pig. And I mean that in the most loving way.

Oh, and P.S. – We’re finally going to have that South Indian dinner to give our friends their wedding present (note the date on that post!)- a year and a half after the fact – this Sunday evening, so all surfaces will have to be cleared by then. Hah! I am so glad it will be dark by the time everyone gets here. I really wish I could get away with candlelight…

Well, that was fun!

We had Miz Shoes and the RLA over this evening to playtest a game MJ and I (in one of our rare joint efforts) are working on as a belated wedding gift for a couple who – in truth, we really don’t know that well. Why are we doing it? The bride is of Indian descent, and she and her husband had a slam-bang, all-out Hindu wedding last year. We were fortunate enough to have been invited, and the experience was too incredible for words.

These are not people who sign up at the bridal registry in your run-of-the-mill chain department store. They wanted people to make something for them. Well, this is what we do. Or what MJ does, rather, and under the circumstances, I got to have input on style and aesthetics. You know, the fun part.

And now, the playtesting begins. To bribe the Shoes, I promised an Indian dinner. And since the bride’s family is from Tamil Nadu in southern India, I am now entering a region of cuisine I’ve never been in before. What to do? Amazon.com to the rescue! And I learned that the flashy “premier” South Indian cookbook, Dakshin: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India , by Chandra Padmanabhan, is not the be-all of the cuisine I had been led to believe. Mile-long ingredients lists, complicated (read – messy), and time-consuming instructions did not ensure success. Both MJ and I tried several different recipes in Dakshin (a couple of them we made more than once, thinking we had screwed something up), and only one them turned out at all (the recipe for idlis). Even so, it seemed like a lot of effort for just an “okay” result. I thought it was me.

Until I spotted this little gem: Vegetarian Samayal of South India: Delicious Cooking from a Tamil Cuisine by Viji Varadarajan. The customer reviews pretty much confirmed that it wasn’t just me — Dakshin apparently frustrates a lot of people. Viji Varadarajan – in her forward, as well as her recipes – is obviously not speaking to whitebread people like me. It’s apparent from the start that she believes her audience is primarily young people of Tamil descent, probably away from home, who she hopes to inspire to carry on the food traditions of their culture. And that’s cool. But you pretty much have to already have quite a bit of familiarity with Indian cooking and ingredients to be able to grok what she’s talking about – not to mention getting past the misspellings, unusual phrasing choices and grammar problems (where were her copy editors, anyway?)

And yet, despite all of that, if you do have some experience with Indian cooking, you will enjoy the hell out of cooking from this book! The recipes are streamlined, easy, and quick to follow. And they taste good! Success! Okay, I’ve only made three things out of it, but previously, I felt accomplished if I finished one recipe out of some other cookbooks. I always wondered how the average woman in India managed to put so many things on the table for one meal, when it took me most of an afternoon to cook one dish. Now I know. They’re really doing it Viji’s way. Right? I think I’ll try some more tomorrow.

Anyway, I don’t know how this turned into a cookbook review, but since it did, I’ll just say that I was very pleased with myself today (okay, it’s yesterday already), and if you want to branch out to South Indian cooking (with the previously mentioned caveats), Vegetarian Samayal of South India: Delicious Cooking from a Tamil Cuisine by Viji Varadarajan is a pretty darned good place to start. I swear – no one paid me to say so!