Pimp My Rice – By Nisha Katona – A Book Review

When I received a mail from Nourish books asking whether I am interested in doing a book review, I jumped up with joy and immediately said a big YES. Reason is I love cookbooks and getting a cookbook written by a wonderful author Nisha Katona even before it being officially launched in the market was something I could not resist.

Nisha Katona is a rice evangelist, barrister and founder of Mowgli Street Food. She has thousands of fans following her on Twitter for Curry Clinics. She also has a popular YouTube channel.

The book travelled all the way from UK to Bangalore in impressive packaging. When I opened the parcel, I was surprised by the size of the book, the hard cover, the page quality, and the images which are styled beautifully, the yummy recipes… I mean everything.

The book Pimp My Rice features all recipes with rice, right from starters to main course to desserts. The author has nicely explained the various methods of cooking rice, whether to soak rice or not to soak and some rice-cooking tips at the beginning of the book. The author even mentioned that rice cooking is favoured where fuel is precious, where pans are few, where mouths are many, where children sit on their mother’s hips as they cook one handed. Rice is therefore understood to be a cook’s best friend.

The author also mentioned about her personal experience with rice, how her mother fed her rice balls in steel plate and how rice is at the spiritual heart of life-affirming situation in India.

The book starts with an Introduction followed by cooking methods. An index with ingredients is maintained at the end of the book making it easy to search for a recipe.

The recipes are classified into the following categories:

Kick starts – Blinged breakfasts

Light Fantastics – Starters, Lunches & late-night munchies

Main Grains – Fantastic feasts from around the world

Souped-up Sides – Super support acts

Happy endings – The rice sweet elite

Some recipes which caught my attention are Pimped rice peri, Turkish stuffed mussels and Belting Bhajis. Chilled rice raita is very similar to the curd rice that we make here.

Since rice is the staple food in majority of Indian places, I feel that this book is a great use in all Indian house-holds. I recommend this book to all people who cook rice daily and who want to try different types of dishes with rice. The book can be purchased from Amazon.