I love cooking and I love love Indian food, but whenever I try to cook Indian food, it just doesn't turn out quite right. This book made me feel a lot better about what I make not being perfect or not being "authentic" and instead made me think more about making sure the food was good.

I know there are lots of recipes online for free so it can be tempting to not buy cookbooks these days. As someone who has posted recipes online before I am very aware of how easy it is for anyone to post anything online, so while I think online recipes are a great resource, I do like to turn to a good old fashioned cookbook sometimes.

The illustrations in this book are so beautiful, they remind me a lot of the illustrations in my favorite cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat. In addition to the beautiful illustrations, the book also had great food photography.

I always love it when a cookbook provides more than just recipes and this was definitely one of those books. I loved all the little historical anecdotes and learning about the linguistic origins of recipe names. It's also super helpful that they provided retailers for some of the ingredients at the end of the book.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone that's curious about Indian cooking.

I've been looking for this book, but I never knew where to look. There's so many books out there on Indian food, but this one might be the best I've seen.

The introduction to the book is fantastic. It covers topics such as the authors, the soul of the ingredients (always more garlic, please!), a taxonomy of common words used (like the authors definition of chopped), and the linguistics of the food.

I really loved the artwork. Mostly using hand drawn images, the artwork makes this cookbook feel warm and inviting, almost like a family heirloom. The pictures that are also included are also beautiful- your mouth waters just looking at the images. Not every recipes has an actual photograph on the same page as the recipe, which can make some home chefs a little nervous wondering if their food looks right. However, the images do appear in other parts of the book.

The recipes are fairly straight forward with introductions by both Jyoti and Auyon. This includes an introduction of the food and tips for cooking. It really felt like having the two authors in the kitchen with me.

The first recipe I tried was the Paneer. This has really been a difficult food for me to make for some reason. I've made variations on similar dishes, but every paneer recipe I've tried before just didn't work. This one, however, was perfect and turned out great. (I bet it was the colander!) I really love paneer, so it's really great to have a recipe to keep in handy.

The recipes do come in both volume and weight measurements, so people who cook with both methods will be satisfied. Since a lot of the ingredients have to be found at specialty stores, I really liked the shopping advice at the beginning of the book. It helped me understand the ingredients and measurements when reading the recipes.

Overall, this is a cookbook that I know I'll use over and over. Perhaps with my notes, it will eventually become a family heirloom, just like how it feels it should be.