Obviously the availability of ready meals in supermarkets; the plethora of curry houses and the "omni present" grandmother, mother or mother-in-law mean that you can probably get by without cooking at all.

But whether married or single, there comes a time when you want to learn.

And this is when the horror story starts. Have you noticed how mothers can simply cook from memory? Even if a family recipe book exists, it may as well be written in Sanskrit for all the sense it makes.

Fortunately we have not been short of good celebrity cooks. Tarla Dalal, the doyenne of vegetarian cooking, even has her own website devoted to the subject. Madhur Jaffrey, Actress and TV cook has written a number of good books but the problem is that much of this is daunting unless you are already an accomplished cook.

What we wanted was help for complete novices.

"Please write about some basic recipes," asked one redhotcurry.com user. "I really need to learn to cook from scratch", said another. " I don't even know what half the ingredients are and can't tell one dhal from another " said a third. "I am usually pressed for time so I can't be bothered with all the grinding and grating involved. I just want quick recipes," said another.

So we posed the problem to Meena Patel, our resident chef.

"What we hope to achieve in this section is to gradually build up a set of basic recipes for home cooked food" explains Meena, "we promise not to foist any recipe on you until we have tried it for ourselves and achieved the desired result!"

Obviously the flavour will initially be Gujarati (as Meena is from this state) and because we feel that much of the Gujarati home cooking talent is disappearing. But we hope to invite other experts to share recipes in the coming months.

In the mean time we hope that you enjoy learning to cook with us.

Choose a recipe from the selection in the left hand column. If you would like to learn a specific recipe then send an email to us, cooking@redhotcurry.com.

If you want to share some thoughts about South Asian Cooking, why not visit our discussion board? Click here.

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