Lite and Luscious Cuisine of India: Recipes and Tips for Healthy and Quick Meals

I am an American who cooks for my Indian husband, and I've tried several cookbooks. This is the best--easy, and uses the same basic 10 spices so you don't have to go out and buy all sorts of spices you've never heard of. I wore out my first copy, and I seriously had to buy another!

I love Indian food but as I have to "watch what I eat these days" I thought Indian food was gone forever. This book is great at giving that nice Indian taste without the fat. I will say it skips the final tempering process so common in traditional cooking, but let's face it, frying several tablespoons of oil with spices and dumping it all on top of a healthy dhal just isn't good for you, neither is it necessary. I use this book a lot even when I am cooking for friends and everyone seems to enjoy it.

What a delight to find an Indian cookbook filled with wonderful recipes that don't take three+ hours to prepare and aren't laden with fat! I can whip up these recipes with one hand, bathe my kid with the other, and still be ready to sit down and eat in less than an hour. Yum. Read Madhur Jaffrey's _Indian Cooking_ for the theory, then pick up this book and start cooking.

I found this book under its old title "Lite and Luscious Indian Cuisine" at the library. I am hoping that only the title has changed, because it's a great book! Ms. Gadia writes in a very conversational way... I feel as though she comes through as a "real person" rather than just an "author"...the recipes are really down to earth as is her writing style. Not many esoteric ingredients are called for (I have a problem sometimes with pantry overload from Indian/Asian cooking...I probably have more kinds of spices in my cupboard than the average Indian person!). It bothers me at times in certain cookbooks when a recipe calls for half a teaspoon of a particular hard to find spice, then doesn't call for that ingredient again in the rest of the book. One ends up with a real overload of spices if you are not cooking Indian every day (especially if you are not cooking for a large family to begin with). In this book some ingredients might be specialized, (asafetida, cardamom pods, etc.) but most of the recipes seem to utilize what is available on hand in your average town (Ms. Gadia lives and works in Ames, Iowa...not New York or Chicago). Those who are on specialized diets will appreciate her tables for food exchanges and nutritional info, too. All around, this seems truly to be "home cooking" and a labor of love!

Wonderful. Makes Indian cooking easy to learn. Includes nutritional analyses, including calories, grams of fat protein and carbohydrates for each recipe, along with meal planning instructions for a healthy diet. All of the recipies are delicious and healthy at the same time. There are many simple recipies that can be prepared in a short time. I was lucky to find this cookbook at random in a bookstore, and it has totally changed my diet. I would choose my own food made from this cookbook over eating out any day.