Sambars & Curries II

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.

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.