Flavorful Shortcuts to Indian/Pakistani Cooking: Winner of Beverly Hills Book Award 2016 Showcases Simplified Tandoori Cooking Curried Dishes Vegetable Dishes Desserts and more...

I own dozens of cookbooks and most of the time only a few of the recipes are any good. So far my wife and I have made four things from the book and they all came out better than expected.Our first experiment was Mango Lassi. We had to go to the indian market and get the canned mango pulp for the best result as per the recipe. Our first attempt was with mango juice from the supermarket and it wasn't that good. When we did it correctly with the mango pulp it was fabulous. The recipe calls for lemon yogurt and that was good but we ran out and made another batch with pineapple yogurt and it was even better.My second try was Chicken Karahi. I followed the recipe exactly until I got to tomato puree. I wasn't too sure what that was so I used tomato paste instead. With the tomato paste it was very similar to a spaghetti sauce but with a slight Indian under tone. Not spicy at all but very flavorful. It put it on some ravioli that I got frozen from the supermarket.Finally we made two dishes for dinner, Aloo Gajjar Mattar and Easy Chicken Tikka. The Aloo dish was made with potatoes, carrots, tomatoes and peas. The Chicken Tikka is chicken marinated in a yogurt mixture. We followed the recipes and both were fantastic. We learned at this point to double the recipe so we would have plenty of leftovers.This book does not have fancy color photographs. Instead, there are black and white images that are more instructional. The magic of this book is in the text. The recipes are detailed but the real benefit is concept. The first part of the book is exactly that.Do yourself a favor before you start anything. Check through a few recipes and start collecting the spices. I have other Indian cookbooks and over time I have just about everything any recipe could ask for. This book requires a lot less than other books I have seen.

For those who gave low ratings on this book - Cooking is not an exact science or art because people will have varied tastebuds and sensitivities tasting spices, flavors and such. Cooking gives us the freedom to taste great food depending how we adjust the spices, aromatics and other ingredients that come to play, and also experience.When the author wrote this book, she is probably thinking, Oh maybe I can help those who are interested and love eating Indian food. Home cooks and food professionals can read and experience these flavorful shortcuts to make great Indian and Pakistani food.To me, what caught my eye on this book is its simplicity of how techniques, prepping methods and some tips were really helpful. Sometimes, they are only a few tips that I disagree like precooking sauteed onions ahead 1 day. I think it is best to cut onions 1 day ahead. Then cook the next day to serve fresh, hot great food to your guests or customers.What is really fun about this book is to know what are the basics and foundation for each ingredients used in a recipe. It was very entertaining, learn something new and quite funny to read this book altogether. I learned a lot! But yeah!, you have to cook, experience and add more spices, ingredients that seemed to be lacking according to your taste preferences. That is why I rated this 5 stars.

I have made one dish, potato with nigella seeds (kalongi aloo) and I tweaked the recipe to my tastes. The main thing is that it's relatively quick to make and it's tasty. What I did differently was that I fried the nigella seeds in a little oil first until the seeds sizzled but not until smoking point, rather than add them at the end according to the recipe. Frying them helps to develop the flavor. I also only used about 1 tbsp of oil instead of 5 tbsp. In fact I never use that much oil in one dish unless I'm making an enormous salad.The other day I made the dish again but this time I used panch phoroan (it's a Bangladeshi/ Bengali five spice mix found in Indian grocery stores) and I used mushrooms instead of potato. That was great too.The table of contents gives a complete list of sections ie street food, chutneys, veggie dishes etc. Then under each section is a list of recipes and the list is fully useable. Touch the link to a recipe and you will go straight to the recipe.My main criticism is that although there are some pictures of finished dishes, there aren't many and mostly are black and white. I love books with plenty of coloured pictures, but I won't deduct any marks for that.Overall I'm so glad I bought the ebook and happy that I can take the ebook everywhere I go.One observation about this book: why is the Kindle version of the book not linked to the paper copy? The hardcopy of the book has positive feedback but it's not linked to the ebook. A bit of an oversight by Amazon.

I am not sure the vision/direction of this book. Is it supposed to be authentic Pakistani recipe book or Americanized Indo/Pak recipes? I really wanted authentic recipes like what get at local Pakistani restaurants. So far I have made the Chicken Karhi which is good, the Chicken Curry which was disappointing and seemed to be missing something, the lamb and spinach was okay but not worth all the work involved and the Keema which my family loves Keema but this recipe was lackluster, tasteless and dry. I just don't really see the recipes in here as being shortened. All of them so far were time consuming at least 90+ minutes.

Talk about out of my comfort zone ... After inviting 26 people to our home for a night of wonderful food I then realized I had NO idea what I was in for ... BUT ... here was Farhana's book ... and even a middle-road cook like me was in with a WIN!I took my time, as she says, read through the book and concentrated on the 6 recipes she recommends to start ... and POOF .. shopping happened without fear and COOKING happened ... (add wonderful smells here!) ... guests were fed and I am onto more recipes!Get it, Read it, DO IT! :-)