Fantastic!

One of the biggest barriers that keeps even proficient chefs like myself from cooking Indian food on the daily is spices: Do I have all of them? Do I need to make a special trip to the asian market? Will the Asian market have everything? Do I want to spend so much money on spices? Will I ever use this many curry leaves? Are they still fresh?

Plus, adding so many spices to a dish, including roasting and grinding them, takes a surprising amount of time.

This cookbook uses combinations of only 5 spices (plus the usual suspects of fresh onion, garlic, serrano peppers, and ginger) for the entire book. The recipes are surprisingly varied, too. When you stop and think about it, many cuisines use only a handful of common spices (Mexican: cumin, oregano, chili, cayenne, paprika; Italian: oregano, basil, thyme, parsley, rosemary, red pepper flakes...etc), so it makes sense that many Indian dishes could also be reduced down to something relatively simple.

The recipes are simple and flexible enough that you can easily substitute out different proteins. I swapped in chickpeas for black-eyed peas. And I think tofu would slide into 75% of the meat dishes without any issues.

yum yum yum...