Friday, October 29, 2010

Madhur Jaffrey


What a great turn out tonight at Third Place Books! There were at least fifty to sixty people at the book reading by Madhur Jaffrey at Third Place in Lake Forest Park. Madhur Jaffrey is an energetic 77 year young woman born in Delhi residing in New York.
She talked about her latest book and also read from her memoir

 Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India. After talking about her new book she entertained a number of questions from the audience and went into a book signing session subsequently.










The staff at Third Place books had prepared recipes from her new book 'At Home With Madhur Jaffrey' for everyone to sample and seeing some go for seconds I knew that people were enjoying the Indian food. Most of the recipes were vegan. There was cucumber salad, Cauliflower Cachumber (found on page 240), Mushroom Pea Curry (page 161), fresh Green Chutney (page 245) Peshawari Red Pepper Chutney (pg 243) and one non-vegetarian sample Chicken With Spinach (page 86)















What I liked about her presentation is that she used examples from her life. For example, she mentioned that she traveled to India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and other countries to collect recipes. She visited the people and actually watched them cook and learnt from them. There was once a poor old fisherman's mother who was cooking with her meager resources. She saw Madhur and invited her to join for supper. Madhur Jaffrey tasted the dish and said that she loved it and decided to include the recipe in her final manuscript.

I spoke with her briefly and mentioned that I am a fan of her vegetarian cookbook and movies, and she said be sure to watch her upcoming movie Today’s Special.



She is headed to San Francisco to continue on her book reading tour to promote her new book.
Photo- Madhur Jaffrey's cookbook 



Recipes from Madhur Jaffrey's book prepared by Third  Place staff.

Author Madhur Jaffrey and blog writer Stuti Garg

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