Quick and Simple Tamil Cooking

To dispel the myth that traditional Tamil cooking is elaborate, time consuming and takes years to learn, Ananda Vikatan  , the leading Tamil weekly had asked me to come up with a series of recipes which can be learnt and cooked very fast. I decided to go a step further and got a friend of mine, Nathalie Van Der Berg, a Dutch girl on her first visit to India, to cook up these recipes. She has not cooked before and has never seen / heard of  these dishes. So, with just a 10 minute instruction and armed with this One page cookbook, she started cooking. The reporters loved it. And all of us later ate what got cooked - it is indeed very hard to go wrong with Tamil cuisine, if you understand the basics straight.