Knack Indian Cooking: A Step-By-Step Guide To Authentic Dishes Made Easy (Knack: Make It Easy)

Indian food is cherished well beyond the subcontinent, but the dizzying array of spices, and the regional variations, are enough to deter many aspiring palates from making its secrets their own. Enter Knack Indian Cooking. With 350 full-color photographs, 100 main recipes, and more than 250 variations organized by ingredient and with chapters devoted to favorite dishes, it offers the most easy-to-follow, visually focused, step-by-step approach available to preparing delicious, authentic Indian meals in Western kitchens, using characteristic spices and cooking methods.

Meenakshi (Meena) Agarwal is a Toronto-based freelance food writer, book reviewer, and cooking instructor. She writes a monthly column in Nosh, the food section of The Mississauga News, called ‘The Home Cook’, based on simple everyday home cooking. Her work has appeared in various online and print publications including the Christian Science Monitor, Alive magazine and Toronto Star’s DesiLife magazine. She gives Modern Asian cooking demonstrations and taped a food segment for Slice TV's 'The Mom Show', which aired in the Fall. Meena' food blog, ‘Hooked on Heat’ (http://www.hookedonheat.com), currently receives over 3000 page views daily, more than half of them are new visitors each day. It has been listed in Food and Wine BlogWatch, finalist in the 2006 IndiBlog Awards and awarded Best New IndiBlog in 2005 by the IndiBloggies.

Meena's mother is Malaysian, her father is Indian, and she grew up in the Middle East. She is now based in Canada.

Peter Ardito and Susan Byrnes, whose photography studio Ardito + Byrnes is in downtown Manhattan, produce food-related imagery for leading magazines and book publishers. Visit them at arditobyrnes.com.