Essential Spices for South Indian Vegetarian Homestyle Cooking
Have you ever wanted to make Indian food at home but didn’t know where to start? What spices to use?
The South Indian Spice Box
My essay on the basic spices necessary for South Indian vegetarian home cooking is on The Aerogram. Here is the link: http://bit.ly/1CK8tIw
It’s part of a series and will explore dishes that were part of my childhood and are now favorites that I make often in my own kitchen. This first essay also includes a recipe for a Potato and Onion Curry.
Indian cuisine is vastly diverse, not only in terms of ingredients, traditions, and techniques, but also in terms of levels of complexity — ranging from simple curries and chutneys to the biryanis that demand multiple discrete steps and hours to cook.
Most Indian home cooking, however, particularly vegetarian home cooking, boasts of a repertoire of recipes that allow one to achieve sophisticated flavors with a few basic fresh and dry spices and herbs. Those recipes and a few slightly higher on the complexity spectrum — from the South Indian kitchens of my childhood and now my own — will be the focus of this essay and the ones that follow.
Sujatha Bagal 