Quick and Simple Tamil Cooking

To dispel the myth that traditional Tamil cooking is elaborate, time consuming and takes years to learn, Ananda Vikatan  , the leading Tamil weekly had asked me to come up with a series of recipes which can be learnt and cooked very fast. I decided to go a step further and got a friend of mine, Nathalie Van Der Berg, a Dutch girl on her first visit to India, to cook up these recipes. 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. The reporters loved it. And all of us later ate what got cooked - it is indeed very hard to go wrong with Tamil cuisine, if you understand the basics straight.

This one page cookbook showcases the recipes which were cooked. Check out the next issue of Ananda Vikatan for the full story.

In fact, Hussein, the photograher, who has never cooked before vowed to start rightaway ! The flipside was that they found the idea of a foreign girl cooking traditional Tamil dishes so fascinating, that I guess I'll be completely sidelined in this article as they shot thrice as many pictures of her as they did of me :)