What You're Actually Getting With This Book
An Anjum Anand's Indian Food Made Easy isn't a comprehensive reference work. It's a practical collection aimed at people who want approachable Indian dishes without spending hours on every recipe. The book covers basics like chana masala, butter chicken, and various curries, along with breads, rice dishes, and snacks. It's organized in a way that assumes you might not have a fully stocked Indian pantry yet, so she tends to include substitutions and notes about where to find ingredients. The recipes themselves are relatively straightforward. Most don't require more than five or six ingredients beyond the usual salt, oil, and basic aromatics. That's the selling point. It works if your idea of Indian food is "tastes good, didn't take all day."Where to Find An Anjum Anand Indian Food Made Easy
You can buy it through most major booksellers online, or search directly for "Anjum Anand Indian Food Made Easy" on Amazon, Waterstones, or Blackwell's. The paperback is widely available in print, and there's also an ebook version if that's more your thing. Occasionally it pops up on eBay or in secondhand bookshops at lower prices, but that's hit or miss depending on your location. I'd avoid the older first edition if you can help it — the recipe testing in later printings caught some errors from the original run.How the Recipes Actually Work in Practice
I've cooked through about half the book over the past few years. Here's the honest take. The method structure is consistent: you typically start by heating oil, then cooking aromatics (onions, garlic, ginger), adding spices, then building the sauce. It's the standard North Indian technique, and Anjum presents it cleanly. The timings are realistic. A lamb roast curry comes together in about 90 minutes from raw meat to the table. Chicken curries run 40 to 50 minutes. That's accurate — not the "ready in 15 minutes" nonsense you see in some modern cookbooks where they count only the active hands-on time. One thing beginners miss: she often brown the onions before adding the liquid or tomatoes. This isn't mentioned as a special technique in most recipes, but it's the single factor that differentiates a decent result from a good one. If you're using canned chopped tomatoes and skipping the browning step because the recipe doesn't explicitly insist on it, your sauce will taste thinner and less rounded. Take the extra eight minutes to get them properly caramelized. Another nuance worth noting: the spice quantities in this book lean slightly conservative compared to what you'd get at a proper Indian takeaway or restaurant. That's intentional — she's writing for a UK home cook audience. If you want more heat or more depth, you adjust it yourself. The book won't tell you to double the garam masala.I ran into a specific problem with the Goan Prawn Curry recipe early on. The book calls for tamarind paste, but the quantity listed (one tablespoon) was nowhere near enough for the serving size. The curry came out flat and one-dimensional. I ended up adding another tablespoon and a squeeze of lime at the end, which brought it closer to what you'd actually get in Goa. I'd suggest starting with two tablespoons of tamarind paste and tasting before you add the coconut milk.
