Ginger and Ganesh: Adventures in Indian Cooking, Culture, and Love

“Please teach me Indian cooking! I will bring ingredients and pay you for your trouble. I would like to know about your culture as well.”

And with this posting on Craigslist, so begins Nani Power’s journey to learn traditional Indian cooking in the most ancient of ways—woman to woman. Welcomed warmly into the homes of strangers, Power meets women of all ages and backgrounds, and from them learns the skills that were passed on to them from their own mothers.

Through the senses of the kitchen, Power re-examines her own path as a woman. She takes the reader into a culture, a cuisine, and the female psyche, with recipes and stories from each chapter revealing the struggle of modern women. Along the way, she manages to fall in love when she least expects to.

The recipes shared in this collection are far from ordinary; they are treasured family recipes from vegetarian homes in India—from homemade cheese cubes in a rich cilantro and almond curry to coconut-stuffed okra and luscious potato-curry dumplings. Power’s recipes and stories pave the road to understanding a culture that is at the same time ancient and so very much part of our modern world.

“Please teach me Indian cooking! I will bring ingredients and pay you for your trouble. I would like to know about your culture as well.”
And with this posting on Craigslist, so begins Nani Power’s journey to learn traditional Indian cooking in the most ancient of ways — woman to woman. Welcomed warmly into the homes of strangers, Power meets women of all ages and backgrounds, and from them learns the skills that were passed on to them from their own mothers. Power takes the reader into a culture, a cuisine, and the female psyche, with recipes and stories from each chapter revealing the struggle of modern women, both American and of Indian descent, searching for identity and a definition of what it means to be a woman today.
The recipes shared in this collection are far from ordinary; they are treasured family recipes from vegetarian homes in India — from homemade cheese cubes in a rich cilantro and almond curry to coconut-stuffed okra and luscious potato-curry dumplings. Power’s recipes and stories pave the road to understanding a culture that is at the same time ancient and so very much part of our modern world.

Nani Power is the author of a memoir and three novels, including the critically acclaimed Sea of Tears and Crawling at Night. Her stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines. She lives in Virginia.