Nani Power Book Launch: Ginger and Ganesh

Congratulations to workshop leader Nani Power, whose book Ginger and Ganesh: Adventures in Indian Cooking, Culture and Love was recently published. On June 15th at 6:00 P.M. at Bambule restaurant in Friendship Heights, The Writer's Center will help host a launch party for the book--and everyone is welcome to come! I will be there, and I hope to see as many of you as possible. Here's information about the event and the book (quite a story behind it), which you can also find on this Facebook event page. By the way, she'll be leading a related one-day food writing workshop on June 20 called "Eating Your Words: A Food Writing Workshop."

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The Writer's Center will be on hand selling books, the author will be there with her Sharpie to chat, answer questions and sign your copy, and the bartenders at Bambule will be serving up some tasty ginger martinis and other drinks at happy hour prices.

As a bonus, we’ll have some hors d’oeuvres on the house and a raffle give-away of an Indian cooking basket care of Nani.

Please spread the word to friends, foodies and book lovers. This will be a festive literary event.

Here’s a taste of Ginger and Ganesh:

Please teach me Indian cooking! I will bring ingredients and pay you for your trouble. I would like to know about your culture as well.

And with this posting on Craigslist, so begins Nani Power’s journey to learn traditional Indian cooking in the most ancient of ways – woman to woman. Welcomed warmly into the homes of strangers, Power meets women of all ages and backgrounds, and from them leanrs the skills they learned from their own mothers.

Thorough the senses of the kitchen, Power re-examines her own path as a woman. She takes the reader into a culture, a cuisine, and the female psyche, with recipes and stories from each chapter revealing the struggle of modern women, both American and of Indian descent, searching for identity. Along the way, she managers to fall in love when she least expects to.

The recipes shared in this collection are far from ordinary; they are treasured family recipes from vegetarian homes in India – from homemade cheese cubes in a rich cilantro and almond curry to coconut-stuffed okra and luscious potato-curry dumplings. Power’s recipes and stories pave the road to understanding a culture that is at the same time ancient and so very much part of our modern world.
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Nani Power is the author of a memoir, Feed the Hungry, and three novels, including critically acclaimed Crawling at Night. Her stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines. She lives in Virginia. You can read Art Taylor's 2008 First Person Plural interview with Nani (upon the publication of Feed the Hungry) right here.