Ananda Vikatan Express cooking series part 1/52

I was surprised and to be honest mildly pleased to see Ananda Vikatan referring to me as Ramki, the Kitchen King ! I do not deserve this title and would certainly be embarassed to use it. I like to think of myself as a primary school teacher, teaching how to string up words into meaningful sentences. In my One page Cookbooks, I explain how the base, flavouring and additive combinations are strung up into meaningful recipes according to a few simple rules.  But this is the very first step and there is much more to cooking than this. 

After you move over from primary school (One page cookbooks), some of you might end up as poets( gourmet cook). I might never write an immortal poem, but I wish and hope some of you will do that ( create great recipes). I'll get my kicks from the knowledge that I played a part in helping you form your first sentences ( basic cooking). 

This issue of Ananda Vikatan carries the first of a series of articles titled Express Cooking where I cookup quick and easy recipes, which first timers can easily create. 

This series will hopefully run for an year, at the end of which it would be published as a book. For this issue, I got a friend of mine, Nathalie Van Der Berg, a Dutch girl on her first visit to India, to cook up traditional Tamil dishes. She has not cooked before and has never seen / heard of  these dishes. So, with just a 10 minute instruction and armed with this One page cookbook, she started cooking and cooked up Carrot Thayir pachadi, Thenga Thogayal and Kaara podi in 10 minutes flat.

Yes, Tamil cuisine is easy, if you get the basics right !