Ginger and Ganesh

Book excerpt: "Please teach me Indian cooking! I will bring ingredients and pay you for your trouble. I would like to know about your culture as well." And with this posting on Craigslist, so begins Nani Power's journey to learn traditional Indian cooking in the most ancient of ways — woman to woman. Welcomed warmly into the homes of strangers, Power meets women of all ages and backgrounds, and from them learns the skills that were passed on to them from their own mothers. Power takes the reader into a culture, a cuisine, and the female psyche, with recipes and stories from each chapter revealing the struggle of modern women, both American and of Indian descent, searching for identity and a definition of what it means to be a woman today. The recipes shared in this collection are far from ordinary; they are treasured family recipes from vegetarian homes in India — from homemade cheese cubes in a rich cilantro and almond curry to coconut–stuffed okra and luscious potato–curry dumplings. Power's recipes and stories pave the road to understanding a culture that is at the same time ancient and so very much part of our modern world.