I'm encouraged because you pick up any food magazine and there's two or three recipes involving Indian spices.
I simplify the spices. I'm the same way as everybody else: if I look at a recipe and there's ten spices in it, I'm going to have to think long and hard about when I'm going to be able to make that... so I try to simplify the spices to three or four.
That's the Indian in me - you must put spices on everything. As a kid, whenever we got sick, my mom would take milk and put turmeric in it. That was our medicine. That was the cure-all. Some people turn to Robitussin.
I feel like my kind of music is a big pot of different spices. It's a soup with all kinds of ingredients in it.
My diet is mostly composed of whole-grain cereals, legumes, beans, lentils. Lots of cooked, baked, or steamed vegetables. Lots of spices like curcumin or cumin that help aid digestion. Some superfoods.
I have encouraged my kids to eat well from day one. I add flavor - herbs and spices - to everything because I don't want them getting used to starchy, bland food. I also want them to experiment - they don't have to love everything, but they do have to try it.
One thing I always make - and I'm sure this is partly to do with memory and yearning and because I've made it ever since my children were born - I make gingerbread every year. And it's partly just the perfume of the spices in the house, makes it smell like winter to me.
I add a lot of citrus to my food and I think that flavors it. And, to me, that what makes it healthier, lower in fat, lower in calories. It adds lots of flavor. Spices, of course. But citrus is definitely kind of my go-to to season and really to really make those flavors, make that food come alive.
I wrote 'Mistress of Spices' at an unusual time when I had a near-death experience after the birth of my second son.
Dissolving differences has always been an important motive for my writing, right from 'The Mistress of Spices.'
