culled from an earlier version of the website:

We hope Indian cooking is sufficiently unfamiliar to many of our readers to make for easy cooking.

No, that's not a typo. We hope that Indian cooking is unfamiliar to many of you because cooking unfamiliar dishes is easier than cooking familiar ones.

Think about it. How many times have you sighed over your version of Aunt Tillie's cinnamon rolls or Uncle Arnold's macaroni and cheese -- yours are good, they're very very good, and yet there's something missing that the originals had. Why do authors like Todd Wilbur keep pumping out Top Secret Recipes from America's Restaurant Chains year after year? Why can the crazy folks at Cook's Illustrated terrorize home cooks with their Perfect Vegetables and Perfect Casseroles? Why will my brussels sprouts never, never be as good as Mario Batali's?

We're never going to measure up to a known (and increasingly mythical) result. It's not going to happen.

On the other hand, your version of Thalipeeth is likely to be the first you've ever had. Your children aren't going to compare your version of Railway Potatoes unfavorably to some older relative's. Your spouse can't frown meditatively, comparing your Butternut Squash Raita to the one you had at your wedding. Even you won't know whether your Dal Poories are exactly as they were meant to be. All you and your family know is whether the dishes taste good, and I promise you that if you use good ingredients and don't burn them they will taste good.

Of course, if you're Indian or Pakistani or Sri Lankan, cross out the names of dishes in that last paragraph and substitute pisco sour yanuq, sopa teologa, lomo saltado, and tamalitos verdes. Or gōngbǎo jīdīng, huíguōròu, fūqī fèipiàn, and shuǐzhǔ. Or penne arrabiata, saltimbocca, abbacchio alla romana, and scialatielli. Or labskaus, semmelknoedel, plettenpudding, and germknoedel. (In transcribing these names from a bunch of websites in languages I don't speak, I hope I haven't inadvertently conveyed a desire, as in the old Monty Python routine, to stroke anyone's thigh.)

Like so many great discoveries, this way of making cooking easier, the Whatchamacallit Strategy, emerged by accident. A million years ago I had an Indian boyfriend (hi, Satinder!) who taught me how to make one simple curry. Long after we parted company, I continued to make the curry. Then I bought two Indian cookbooks, William Kaufman and Saraswathi Lakshmanan's The Art of India's Cookery (Doubleday, 1964) and Mary S. Atwood's A Taste of India (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), and some years after a third, Dharamjit Singh's Indian Cookery (Penguin, 1971).

In my mind, I somewhat confused Indian and Indonesian cooking and used to produce massive buffets that more resembled rijstaffels than Indian meals. (Rijstaffels are gigantic banquets of the Dutch East Indies consisting of many dishes so large that each had to be carried by a separate waiter.)

But no matter. The food tasted good, there was plenty, and I even invented one wholly inauthentic condiment, minced onion salted, made sour with lime juice, and flecked with grated lime rind. (I recommend it.)

The wonderful influx of Indians to the United States has now made Indian restaurants commonplace. I've eaten good Indian food in Springfield, Illinois, and Rochester, New York. I never try to duplicate such food at home. Instead, I cook dishes I've never tasted, Indianish Whatchamacallits, and I invite you to do the same.