Chandra Padmanabhan, an expert cook, has been dishing up delicious meals for her family and friends for more than twenty-five years. Over the years, she has experimented with various styles of vegetarian cooking and ingeniously adapted them to suit every palate. Dakshin is a compilation of her favourite recipes, and several years after it was first published, it continues to be the best introduction to vegetarian South Indian cuisine.
But it is cooking that has been the author's forte for nearly four decades. She is the author of five best-selling titles, Dakshin, Southern Spice, Simply South, Southern Flavours and Dosai. Simply South won the Gourmand International Award for Second Best Vegetarian Cookbook in 2009.
The international edition of Dakshin, published by HarperCollins, Australia in 1994, is still a pick on the shelves of bookshops all over the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia.
Cooking, as we all know, varies significantly from region to region. South Indian vegetarian cuisine is subtly flavoured yet rich in variety. It is simple, wholesome, nutritious, and above all, the food, when prepared, retains the basic essence of its flavour. It is never subordinated to palatability by merely plastering it with an excess of rich condiments, spices and additives.
The South Indian is a rice eater. A typical meal consists of three courses rice, with sambar, rasam and curd. As accompaniments there are a variety of vegetable dishes, pickles and salads to choose from. Appalams and papadams, either fried or roasted, are always served on the side. A meal is carefully planned, blending and balancing colours, textures, flavours and nutritional contents. If, for example, the sambar is hot and rich, a bland vegetable is served by way of contrast.
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