Great cookbook with excellent pictures. The focus is vegetarian South Indian recipes - great book for explaining history and way to cook these recipes. Definitely going to recommend this cookbook for anyone interested in cooking vegetarian Indian food.

I am mostly a hobby chef and I am very far from a high level of proficiency, but regardless how successful I am sometimes, I will never dare to pretend I can cook Indian. I figured out that I need so much experience and maybe the exercise of growing up with certain spices and ingredients therefore, any attempt on my side to be authentic is deem to fail. I am so fearful of cultural appropriations that I better request the kindness of my Indian friends for an authentic meal.
Vibrant India, by the food teacher Chitra Agrawal threw a lot of temptations that I keep resisting. It shares vegetarian recipes from the Southern part of the country, presented in pleasant illustrations and with a long introduction into the techniques, tools to use, flavors and combinations that can be made. It offers ideas for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with long explanations that help you to reduce the chances of failure. (However, regardless how hard is to find a good dosa restaurant, I will rather prefer to wait until there is one than to try my own). But if you are courageous enough, you can find so many good recipes to try - lime dill rice with pistachios and lemon peanut rice or yogurt rice with pomegranate and mint sound so doable - and enjoy. The elaborated recipes gives you time to understand the ingredients and follow the right steps for success.
There are so many interesting and nourishing recipes that you can easily surviving on a one-year Indian diet. At least.
Recommended to Indian food lovers and courageous cooks. I am trying to gather the courage to try something one day, but until then Vibrant India made it into a very entertaining and good foodie reading.

His is a very comprehensive and well-thought cookbook. I’m not giving it five stars just because the directory and some of he references aren’t available for me, since I’m not a US citizen.

This book has been purchased and sits proudly on my shelf. The book is stunning and the recipes so tasty and make the house smell divine. The book makes South Indian food accessible, tasty and healthy, a great resource for the home cook.

A great cook book for Indian food, I appreciated the number of recipes included and the ingredients that were utilized.

I feel fortunate to have grown up with parents who were always excited to try new cuisines. Any and every new opportunity to try something different was embraced with relish.

There weren't many opportunities for exposure to Indian food in our town, no Indian restaurants to speak of at the time, but our next door neighbors were Indian. Dad still raves to this day about a carrot fudge they shared when he helped them with a building project. I'm ashamed to say that I know no specifics about what part of India they were from and so can't say whether the food they shared was North Indian or South Indian. I don't even know if they were vegetarians or not. But I do know that that exposure and my parents' openness to foods beyond those they grew up with, left me with a lifelong love of all kinds of cuisine, Indian in particular.

I discovered Chitra Agrawal via Twitter and her blog, The ABCD's of Cooking. She started the blog back in 2009 (I came to it a bit later down the line), sharing vegetarian recipes "...rooted in traditional Indian cooking and reflective of Indian diaspora." And the recipes are based on those she grew up eating as well as those she's adapted and created herself using local ingredients in New York. In reading her new cookbook, this becomes even more apparent with the many nods to her farm share as inspiration for new twists on recipes!

Agrawal's focus, and the focus of her new book Vibrant India: Fresh Vegetarian Recipes from Bangalore to Brooklyn, is mainly on South Indian food, as opposed to the North Indian cuisine many of us are likely more familiar with. And the key, for me, is that the recipes are laid out in a manner that's easy to follow and that they're generally healthy. In other words, recipes I can feel confident in recreating and good about eating!

I've mentioned before that my process for reviewing a cookbook first involves flagging a multitude of recipes to try. And I began that way here as well, but there was an extra step before hitting the store to start cooking. I headed over to a fabulous Indian market amazingly located quite near my house. It's a store I've frequented before for ingredients that are harder to find elsewhere - Indian chiles, fresh curry leaves, asafetida, black mustard seeds, and a handy garlic ginger paste that I always keep on hand - so I had some familiarity with the ingredients called for in most of the recipes already. (And I should add that curry leaves are phenomenal!)

Those ingredients in hand, I hit the grocery store for a few items and headed home to make my first few dishes: "Cucumber, Tomato and Onion Yogurt Raita" to go alongside "Fragrant Eggplant and Green Pepper Rice." Readers, there was almost no raita left by the time the main dish was ready, it was that good! And the rice, with its base of turmeric spiked basmati was equally tasty. The following morning, I made Chitra's "Hotel" Scrambled Eggs and they were beyond divine!

My house now fragrant of black mustard seeds and curry leaves, I decided I had to try both the "Beet Yogurt Raita" and the "Radish Yogurt Raita" as well. And then the "Butter Lettuce 'Dosa' Wrap With Curried Potato and Chutney" caught my eye too.

Meyer lemons in the latest produce delivery means my next recipe will be the "Meyer Lemon Pickle" and, the one I'm really dying to get to next, "Ben's Curry Leaf Popcorn" is going to be my afternoon snack.

As is always the case, I've still got most of the book to go. But I love that the techniques, once learned, are pretty universal for most of the recipes. Tempering the black mustard seeds and spices, for example, is a method that appears frequently throughout the book (the method that's left my house smelling so yummy, in fact), and it's super easy to get the hang of. Honestly, the hardest part for most people will be sourcing some of the more specific ingredients. Not to worry, though, Agrawal does include a list of places to buy Indian mainstays.

The recipes are incredibly versatile. Agrawal includes an intro to each dish listing, in many cases, variations as well as pairings for the dishes. And while many of them are spicy, which satisfies me of course, they can be made less so for milder palates. And there's always those addicting raitas and rice to help cool them too!

This is a book I'm excited to continue using. One that will help especially as our garden picks up this year and we find ourselves buried under tomatoes, zucchini, and (hopefully) eggplant.

Wonderful book with beautiful illustrations. I love the way this book is more than just a cookbook, it gives the reader little insights into Indian life, culture and beauty of South India. The recipes are easy to follow and all vegetarian friendly!

I was looking for a purely Indian cookbook. This has stories and lots of background. In all honesty, I never got into the recipes, this wasn't what I wanted or expected. Also, had problems getting pictures to load, which I did not expect.

To sum it up as succinctly as possible, Agrawal delivers everything that the title promises. The book practically overflows with recipe after recipe, all of which help deliver a little bit of southern India into one's kitchen through their abundant array of flavors that pop from this rich collection of delicious vegetarian recipes.

Being Indian I love Cookbooks on Indian cuisine........A great collection of recipes from India.......

What a glorious burst of colour this book is. If it is true that we first eat with our eyes, this book will certainly make you hungry to try the recipes in this book.
The book is well set out with a list of ingredients and how to for cooking South Indian meals. The recipes are easy to follow, full of colour and fresh ingredients. All the recipes are vegetarian, with most vegan and gluten free which I really like.
A wonderful book that will fill you with joy as you cook.

A beautifully illustrated vegetarian cookery book.

I really enjoyed reading the introduction to each recipe and found that by the time I got to the ingredients list I was already wanting to head for the kitchen and start preparing. We have always enjoyed Indian food and with two vegetarian daughters I have spent a lot of time preparing Indian vegetarian food yet I found many new ideas within this book.

If you enjoy Indian food but have not yet braved preparing it from scratch I am sure this book will help inspire you to create some extremely delicious meals, whether you're vegetarian or not.

I would have given it 5 stars but for the chapter introductions which are black text on a red background and I found they strained my eyes to read.

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing a digital review copy.

Vibrant indeed! This is such a well put-together book, complete with family memories and recipes. Refreshing, tasty, and meat-free recipes are designed to be balanced and have complementary flavors. Emphasis is placed on using fresh, seasonal vegetables in a myriad of creative meals. Recommended.

Vibrant is an excellent descriptor, and we're glad that's in the title - and this book lives up to to that, with excellently bright recipes.

TITLE: For intensely curious and serious cooks: Recipes are doable, but involved and complex with long ingredient lists

This is awesome example of a first-generation American documenting and sharing her heritage—South Indian, and from a food point of view. Author Chitra Agrawal has given her full attention to South Indian food traditions and has compiled all she has experienced and learned in this extensive and colorful cookbook. If you wonder how personable her style is, you need only browse through her website ABCDsofcooking. She obviously loves what she does and she loves to teach and share information.

Glance through the “Look Inside” feature on this product page to get an idea of the variety of recipes. You can’t see any recipes in the “Look Inside”, but I can tell you that the page layout and type styles are easy on the eyes. Instructions/advice/tips are lengthy, so you get plenty of help as you work to master a cuisine that—for all its fresh, vegetarian ingredients—is involved and complex.

While I appreciate this huge undertaking, and appreciate the intricacies of South Indian cooking, I found the book overwhelming and somewhat intimidating. This book is meant for those who are serious about learning the ins and outs of South Indian foods and cooking. This is not a book to toy with for quick evening meals right off the bat. Reading the recipes and history and practicing techniques--if you are new to Indian cooking--will take quite a bit of time. And there is an over-abundance of the author’s personal family history, too. (I do not see the value of looking at her grade school group picture…..)

Saying all that is not to criticize the book or author, but to give you a heads-up: Plan on spending a lot of time studying this cookbook and pursuing ingredients (both the freshest veggies and pantry items), before “throwing” a South Indian meal together. However, if you are already familiar with Indian foods, (for example, all the dals), these recipes will be less intimidating, I think.

I’ll put it this way: This cookbook is not as approachable as a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook. The recipes in this book are not on Agrawal’s website. (I find her website recipes more approachable.) But the recipes in the book are definitely doable. The book is comprehensive. The book is a very interesting read, and the pictures are stimulating. There is not a picture for each recipe.

My favorite recipes were rice dishes and soups, although they, too, have long ingredient lists. The curries did not appeal to me. The salads—while they inspired me—have a lot of ingredients and I don’t have access to fresh veggies daily, and no farmers’ markets in my area either. Vegetable dishes are varied: Some almost too simple and basic, some are side dishes that seem too involved for a weeknight, some vegetable recipes are meals in themselves.

These recipes might force you to clear a shelf in your pantry for items that you may not regularly stock: There are many dals—chana dal, chana dalia, mung beans, red and yellow lentils, toor dal, urad dal (whole and split), black-eyed peas, chickpeas and horse gram. There’s a variety of rice and grains and flours. You’ll need a larger supply of some well-known spices and some new ones: Asafetida, black mustard seeds, fenugreek, turmeric, green cardamom, coriander, cumin, saffron, cinnamon sticks, cloves. You will be using dried, fresh and powdered chiles. You might have some trouble searching out curry leaves, jiggery and tamarind. You will develop a relationship with coconut: Fresh, dried, frozen.

So, yes, these recipe ingredient lists will appear long. Once you get used to the “usuals”, the lists will not seem so intimidating. The more familiar you are with the ingredients and techniques for using them, the easier the recipes will appear.

*I received a temporary download of this book from the publisher, and have been working with it for several months prior to its publication.

This cookbook is amazing, well written with delicious recipes and beautiful pictures. Best of all, these recipes are vegetarian. I'm not vegetarian, but I believe that a plant based diet is a healthier choice.
Very recommended if you love Indian Food. You will not be disappointed!

Vibrant India melds tradition with the modern, capturing and adapting South Indian dishes for the home cook, whether you grew up eating Indian food, or it’s all new. The book suggests vegetable variations for dishes that reflect what’s available in the grocery store and farmers markets, while also giving advice that’ll help shoppers new to Indian grocers. Well worth a spot on your bookshelf. 4 stars. Full review: http://dailywaffle.com/2017/03/21/book-review-vibrant-india-chitra-agrawal/

Never, ever read through a cookbook while hungry. Especially not this cookbook. I am absolutely desperate for Indian food right now - there are so many delicious-sounding recipes here, plus lots of really great tips for basic stuff that will hopefully help someone like me, who has very little experience cooking her own Indian food.

There is much enjoyable learning to be had in this book. Besides the far-ranging-in-taste recipes, which are arranged in sections, and indexed by name and suggested menus, Vibrant India is like a cooking class given by a good friend. Chitra Agrawal starts by introducing you to her family, one parent from Southern India, and the other from Northern India. In explaining the differences between both sets of cuisines, I learned that the US version of Indian food is Northern derived, while the Southern has the diet, yoga and meditation practice called Ayurveda. Sour, sweet, bitter, spicy and savory tastes come together in many ways, and Chita Agrawal is there to coach us how to to it ourselves.

I have been cooking Indian food for some time, but mainly just following recipes. In Vibrant India, I learned techniques, and the reasons behind them. Tempering spices, using a spice tin (masala dabba), and making chapatis using a bellan and chakla were all new to me. I appreciated the gentle coaching about the caution one must take in tempering spices, and the breezy advice to take it in stride if the spices are burned...try, try again will bring success.

I learned about all the different kinds of lentils (dal) and legumes. Some are used as spices, others for thickening agents, some in sweets, others the main ingredient in a meal. Though I have asafetida in my spice cabinet, I haven't used a lot of it, but am now excited to try it, now knowing that its "beauty lies in frying it in oil." Likewise, nuts, flours, chiles, sweeteners and souring agents are all given their due, with specific brands even recommended.

The love for her cuisine, her family, and her life are evident throughout the book. Not only was my belly sated by her recipes, my brain's hunger was filled, and my heart warmed by her stories of her extended and close family members. The photography and illustrations were feasts unto themselves.

Vibrant India deserves to be the splotched and stained go-to reference book on your shelves.

Many thanks to Netgalley for the advanced reader's copy.