Quick and easy recipes from India
Chef has a veggie-forward approach to everyday cooking
“It’s just a joy to be able to cook with vegetables,” says award-winning British chef and food writer Meera Sodha.
From her debut cookbook, Made in India (Flatiron Books, 2015), to her plant-based column for The Guardian, Sodha’s recipes revel in the full flavours and traditions of regional Indian home cooking. And in her latest book, Fresh India (Flatiron Books, 2018), she showcases just how tasty vegetable-led food can be.
“I wrote Fresh India because I wanted to show that you can put vegetables at the centre of your table and they are worthy and they ’re delicious and they deserve celebrating,” she says.
“Previously in the Western world, a lot of people would put meat or fish at the centre of their plate and vegetables were relegated to the side. And that’s not the case in India and with Indian cooking.”
The collection of 130 dishes includes “great first-timer recipes” such as cauliflower korma with blackened raisins, mid-week meals that come together in under 30 minutes like fresh matar paneer and seasonal favourites that include squashed tomato uttapam (a savoury pancake).
Some are based on Sodha’s timehonoured family recipes while others were inspired by foods she’s eaten on journeys throughout India and Sri Lanka.
“Wherever I travel to, I try to elbow my way into people’s kitchens to see what they’re feeding themselves and their families,” she says.
Sodha’s ancestral home of Gujarat, India’s most westerly state, continues to be “at the heart” of her approach.
Primarily a vegetarian region, millions of Gujarati people contribute to “a rich and resourceful vegetable-first way of cooking” that has developed over thousands of years.
“This type of cooking has evolved that is very creative and very innovative. And I think that is the joy now … that if you do take away meat from your meal, the possibilities are actually endless,” Sodha says.
Consider the extreme versatility of “the humble chickpea,” she says.
They’re readily accessible, inexpensive and protein-heavy. You can buy them dried, canned or ground into flour. They can be fried, toasted, roasted, simmered and stewed.
“I had taken it for granted until I started putting together a list of all of the different recipes that include chickpea flour or chickpeas in different guises and there are so many,” Sodha laughs.
“What’s so exciting about vegetarian cooking is it has so much further to go and you can do so many interesting and wonderful things with vegetables. That’s really what Gujarat and Gujarati cooking taught me, and what I wanted to share with other people.”