My Indian Cooking Roadmap

One of my goals in learning Indian Cooking was to learn proper use of spices, which I knew Indian Cusine used to make tasty dishes, in many cases vegetarian. I started with rice dishes, because rice appeared to the the main starch, and probably the most basic and easiest to cook. Next I was led to lentils, which cooked similar to rice, by my cookbooks. The last and hardest dishes to get right were curries.

So I've grouped and ordered recipes into:

• Rice dishes
• Lentil dishes
• Curry dishes

These dishes also make up meals. Any meal with just one dish gets boring, no matter how tasty. A lentil soup serves as an appetizer, a rice dish serves as the main starch, and a curry dish serves as a vegetable side.

So meals look like:

1. Lentil (soup, appetizer)
2. Rice (starch, main)
3. Curry (vegetable side, over rice or with flat bread)

While I think of rice and flat bread as the nutritional center, the curry is usually the real star. A few other dishes like chutney condiments, snack and deserts round out the taste and texture palette.