Suggestions

[OakLeaf]

I agree. I went through an Indian food phase when DH and I first got together. I cooked Indian 2-3 days a week for probably three years and never progressed beyond slavishly following recipes. If you pick one cuisine and stick with it, you have a hope of beginning to understand it and learning to cook creatively, or at least have a small repertoire that you can come down to when you don't have a recipe in front of you or just don't feel like the complication. Plus, any single cuisine is enough to fill most people's spice cabinet. And then there's freshness of the spices. Unless you have a good bulk shop where you can buy herbs and spices a tablespoon at a time, if you're cooking in too many different cuisines, you're using so little of each spice that they all go stale (or you have to keep throwing out and replacing them, not good either).

I should add that most spices come in 4-oz packages at the Indian grocery, sometimes larger. So you have to buy (and use or potentially discard) WAY more than you do when you're buying Eurocentric spices in 1/2 or 1 oz ziplocs. Again, a good bulk shop will have most of what you need to cook most Indian recipes, but things like asafoetida and curry leaves that you'll need often, and less common things like black cumin, amchoor, black salt, anardana, foenugreek leaves, or black cardamom, can be hard to find anywhere but an Indian grocery.

[shootingstar]

Well, Oakleaf unlike you, I know for certain I would need a cookbook for East Indian dishes. So I should clarify, that my natural, no-cookbook tendencies is Far Eastern, non-East Indian cuisine.

In my last job, I worked with a woman around my age, who did want to lose weight (she probably needed to lose at least 30 lbs.) but she seemed to have a tough time thinking or BELIEVING dishes completely outside her Eastern European confines, could even become part of her diet to help her lose weight. At lunch hr. I noticed her continuously surfing websites that used mayonnaise, and I'm sorry, other junk/non healthy/processed ingredients.

Her definition of dieting..I could tell was what she tried to switch for her snacks and offer me stuff that I turned down half of the time: rice cakes with carmelized sugar, granola bars with sugar, etc.

And remember this is living in a large city with a huge range of ethnic ingredient choices, not in a rural area in North America.

[cylegoddess]

Im with oak leaf! sorry to be vague( as I am born vague!) what I mean, is that most people I meet who go veggie get overwhelmed, by too much and quit. so its easy to pick one type to start! but order out too!
the hari krishnas have a great cook book that is easy and yummy.you can get it any any hari krishna kitchen( usally in bigger citys) or I bet, on amazon.
I think its called ;a higher taste