Meeru Dhalwala and Vikram Vij, 2010
I wish I liked this cookbook, since I got it as a gift, but it's been mostly a bust. Too bad, because I quite liked Vij's original cookbook, though I haven't gotten as much use out of it as I expected when I wrote it up. If that was the cookbook of Vij's restaurant, and this is the cookbook for Vij's home, then I guess I'm glad I've been to his restaurant and haven't been to his home.
There are three main problems I encountered with the recipes here (and note that I'm only talking about the vegetarian chapter, since I'm a vegetarian):
| 1) | Way too much cayenne. I like reasonably spicy food, but I quickly learned that any reference in this book to a quantity of cayenne needed to be changed to "a pinch." |
| 2) | Too much water. All of these curries came out as soups. Apparently that's deliberate but it's not to my taste. |
| 3) | Too much coconut milk. Based on the text I gathered that "at home" meant, to a great extent, "kid-friendly," and that often meant drowning any flavor of the dish in coconut milk to make it bland enough for a six-year-old. I kept thinking these would be good, since I like coconut milk-based Thai curries, but they never were. |
I can't be entirely negative, because there were two winners: a zucchini soup with a milk and turmeric base, and a "steak-cut" cauliflower cooked in a tomato masala. But all in all, yeah, this is no reason to stop going to Shalimar.
