Indian-Ish

Starred review from April 1, 2019

What Indian cookbook has a recipe for dump cake? This one. Many cookbooks featuring Indian cuisine come with extensive lists of ingredients that are not always easy to find. Following Ultimate Dining Hall Hacks, Krishna's latest uses simple ingredients to create an easy, fun approach to Indian-American cooking, resulting in accessible recipes that blend traditional American with Indian cuisine. Tomato cheese masala toast is a great example of an easy homestyle food that translates into both cultures. Recipes such as roasted aloo gobi and tomato rice with crispy cheddar make traditional dishes easy to re-create, even for new cooks. The lighthearted style of text is easy to read and makes readers feel as if they're learning in the Krishna home kitchen. VERDICT Krishna's newest offering will delight cooks seeking to expand their palate and knowledge of Indian cuisine. With easy-to-follow recipes, the "Indian-ish" additions to many American homestyle favorites will appeal to even the pickiest eaters.--Dawn Lowe-Wincentsen, Oregon Inst. of Technology, Portland

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2019
Bon Appetit, New York Times, and New Yorker contributing food writer Krishna's new cookbook reads like a blog. Its first 50 pages are laden with exclamation points, furnished with FAQs, and overloaded with charts, tips, and instructionals, including one useful page on chhonk, the Indian technique of cooking spices in ghee or oil until fragrant. The vegetable-forward recipes that follow?the book includes just four nonveg dishes?are more coherent and enticing. Drawn from Krishna's mother's home cooking, the book pairs Indian inspiration with American accents that result in dishes like spinach and feta cooked like saag paneer, and roti pizza. Other recipes like bhindi (a dry-roasted okra) and lauki sabzi (a saut�ed gourd) are more traditionally Indian. Throughout, Krishna is forgiving with ingredients?sub zucchini for lauki or whole-wheat tortillas for roti?and loose with instructions, often giving directions for the microwave or electric multicooker alongside those for the stove top. Though dishes like khichdi and pesarattu may be unfamiliar to readers, Krishna shows they can hold as prominent a place in American home cooking as lasagna and tacos.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)