Padma Lakshmi - Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet

[Padmas] new book, imbued with her personality, is beautiful to look at, international in flavors, very New World in its Lobster Bruschetta, and also very Old World in its south Indian Green Mango Curry. A joyful book both to read and to cook from.

Madhur Jaffrey

The title says it all the perfect melting pot cookbook. Every recipe, from the simple to the exotic, will take you on a delicious culinary journey around the world.

Tom Colicchio, Chef/Owner Craft Restaurants

Padmas food is a real treat to eat. She cooks in a very relaxed wayshes someone who loves food and has got an instinct for how everything goes together.

Nigella Lawson

Tangy allows Padma to share with us her rich cooking and eating experience. Padma has created exciting and unexpected wonderful recipes mostly inspired by her Indian heritage but with very original and personal twists. Its smart fusion at its best.

Eric Ripert, Executive Chef/Co-Owner Le Bernardin

When I was a little girl, my mother worked full time and then went to classes several nights a week for her masters degree. I would often help her in the kitchen when she got home. It was where we spent the most hours together. I graduated from shelling peanuts and breaking off the ends of beans to chopping vegetables and standing at the stove. My mother, who is a great cook, was famous for being able to make an impromptu meal in half an hour with whatever she had in the kitchen at the time. She was known for being able to whip something up out of nothing. I learned at her elbow and watched. In those days it was harder to find black mustard seeds, fresh ginger, and coconut milk. But shed use whatever she found, whatever she tasted in other peoples homes, and shed bring home some strange flora from the farmers market that would find its way into a pot, bubbling away with a bit of seasoning. Before you knew it a whole meal was being placed hot and steaming on the table while you were just chatting by the stove. She had a gift for making everyone feel welcome and everything so easy. You would want to drop in on her; shed make you want to come back again and again. Thats what a good hostess does when youre at her table.

Being a single mom gave my mother little opportunity to linger in the kitchen for hours, and so as I stood by her side I, too, learned to improvise and make things taste good in a rush. She was, and still is, great at simplifying all sorts of exotic dishes. In New York, where wed moved to start a new life, there were immigrants like us from all over the world, and our kitchen was heavily influenced by them.

From Polish sausages to Vietnamese steamed fish, the world was right here on our island. I had a Peruvian babysitter named Elena who taught me how to make mashed potato empanadas. Otis, my moms boyfriend at the time, was from Barbados. Through him we experienced the tropical curries of the Caribbean. My playmates from one floor down were Filipino, and at their mothers table I tasted the noodle dish pancit.

The dishes we tasted throughout the city, in restaurants, at other peoples houses, in the sharing of packed lunches at school and workall made their way into our kitchen. We went to the Puerto Rican market in Spanish Harlem for sugarcane. We frequented Chinatown to buy salted plums and bok choy. My mother never missed an opportunity to introduce my young palate to new and surprising tastes.

When I was older, we moved to a suburb of Los Angeles, and I traveled to India for holidays. I used to stop along the way in Singapore and Tokyo. These trips broadened my culinary horizons even more. By the time I was in college I was trying different recipes from the international students who cooked in my dorm. When I studied abroad in Spain, the first things I learned to say in Spanish were the names of the ingredients I needed to make the dishes that reminded me of home. Later I learned to duplicate in my own kitchen what I had tasted in Madrids vast array of restaurants and tapas bars.

My career as a model took me around the globe, and I continued my gastronomical research every place I went. Living in Paris, I learned about European food traditions to which I had never been exposed. I learned that the Spanish, French, and Italian all use bchamel sauce in various dishes. When I lived in Milan, I absorbed as much of the regions gastronomy as I could. Then living and working in Rome taught me about southern Italian cuisine. I realized that French food was actually based on pre-Columbian Italian cuisine; Catherine de Medici married the future French king Henri II and took her Florentine culinary practices with her to France. It wasnt until the tomato was introduced from the New World that Italian food became as different from its French counterpart as it now is.