Indian Food Cuisine

India has by far the most vegetarians of any country in the world, both in quantity (there are around one billion people there) and by percentages. Many of the followers of Hinduism consider being a vegetarian to be one of the most important (if not most important) aspects of being religious. Vegetables are an integral part of our food and we consume them in a number of ways. For pure vegetarians India is a heaven. India can boast for its innumerable varieties of tasty and nutritious vegetarian dishes. Indians like their vegetable curries real hot 'n' spicy and so add a number of spices to make them really exotic. These are also prepared using different methods of cooking like baking, boiling, frying etc.Indians take their food very seriously. Cooking is considered an art and mothers usually begin to teach their daughters and pass down family recipes by show-and-tell, fairly young in life. Mealtimes are important occasions for family to get together. Most meals comprise of several dishes ranging from staples like rice and breads to meat and vegetables and rounded off with a dessert. In a lot of Indian homes, foods are made from scratch with fresh ingredients. For example, some families buy their favorite type of wheat, wash it, dry it in the sun and then take it in to a flourmill to have it ground into flour exactly the way they like, as opposed to buying flour from a store! This is changing in bigger cities where people have increasingly hectic lives and are happy to use ready-to-eat, pre-made ingredients.Indian vegetarians are primarily lacto-vegetarians, which mean that they do not eat meat, fish or eggs, but they do eat milk. A common cooking ingredient in Indian homes for frying is ghee, which is derived from butter. Because of its expense, usually even in high-end hotels it is not used for cooking, but vegetarian oil is used instead. So if you are a vegan you may want to ask what various foods are fried in.When you order food in India y ou should be careful to make it very clear that you want pure vegetarian food. Even if a restaurant states that it is vegetarian, ask very clearly if they sell meat or eats.Vegetables are the indispensable ingredient of Indian food. The vegetables were present in the Indian cuisine since the Vedic era. The first vegetables mentioned in the Rigveda are the lotus stem (visa), and the cucumber (urvaruka). Vedas also refer to several others, like lotus roots (shaluka), the bottle-gourd (alabu), the water-chestnut (saphaka, mulali), two other aquatic plants (avaka and andika), and the bitter gourd (karivrnta or kara-vella). The Buddhist and Jain canonical literature6 refers to yams (aluka), two convolvulus roots (etaluka and kadambu), and several leafy vegetables. Kautilya in his Artha-shastra refers to the rajdhana or ksiri (now kauki, Manilkara kauki) and to the cucumber as chidbhita.Most of the vegetables are mentioned in the Ramayana. The great epic speaks of the surana or el ephant yam (vajrakanda), the pindaluka (possibly the sweet potato, the bottle gourd (kalasaku), the sleshmataka and lasora (both Cordia species that bear fruits which can be cooked or pickled), karira (Capparis decidua, with edible sour berries), and sudarshana or vrspani (unidentified).

iAutoblog the premier autoblogger software