The Journey Towards The Indian Cookbook (Isha P.)

When the teachers offered us the opportunity to create a new project to work on, I was lost. I didn’t know what I was interested in and I didn’t know what sort of product I wanted to make. Originally, my desire was to work on an ethical research paper regarding the issue of gender selection and genetic engineering. Ultimately, that plan fell through, and thus the idea for the Indian Cookbook was created.

We have three group members: Anjali, Oceane, and I. Anjali and I originally came up with the idea for the book because we are both Indian, but also from two different regions of the country. I am from the state of Gujarat, while Anjali is from the South (state of Kerala). These two regions have completely different cuisines. This difference in cuisines really got me thinking: What about the other regions of India that we haven’t explored yet? I was curious about the North Indian cuisine and the East Indian cuisine. I also wanted to learn about the different health benefits of Indian cuisine, since many people are vegetarians and need special diets to get the correct nutrients. This article, Benefits of Indian Diet, really showed me why people follow the Indian diet. I wanted to show other people as well. With this in mind, we embarked on our journey.

Oceane was a new member of our team. We decided she would be a good addition because she has no experience with Indian food or cooking the elaborate Indian dishes. She is the “test subject” in our team. She will try the Indian food for taste and she will also attempt our recipes. This way, we can learn how to improve our cookbook and what changes we need to make to the recipes to make them the best they can be.

Over the past week, the team has been hard at work creating the format for the book. We originally wanted to create a book that was separated by the different regions. Each region would have approximately five to six recipes and we would include some breakfast, lunch, and dinner recipes. After conducting some research, we learned that almost all of the regions of India have a “thali” or plate of food that is traditional to them. These “thalis” have a main dish, a bread, most likely some rice, side dishes, desserts, and more. We figured that this way of organizing our cookbook would be extremely beneficial because it would include all aspects of that region’s cuisine. So, at the moment, our cookbook is organized by region, but with each region having a “thali” instead of five or six recipes.

We’ve also been exploring other fun aspects we can include in our cookbook, such as health blurbs, certain historical influences in the food (such as the Mughals on north Indian cuisine), and the insight of a non-Indian (Oceane). Ms. Jo has also talked to us about Dosha, an ayurvedic test that tells you what foods you should eat. This link will take you to a quiz that can tell you what Dosha you are. We are looking into the possibilities of creating a quiz like that for our book. We have decided at the moment that we will be using iAuthor to compile our book. It has some cool features such as video integration, photo slideshows, and more that would make our cookbook amazing.

There are many things that we are working on at the moment to make our cookbook the best it can be. We have a pinterest page for all of our recipes, we have gotten permission to go off campus to try out our recipes, and we have begun organizing our book. Next week, we plan on going off campus to my house to try out our recipes. Hopefully, this endeavor will succeed!