Founder of Indian As Apple Pie | Cookbook Author | Journalist
Born in Punjab, India, and raised in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, I grew up straddling two worlds: one foot in India — visiting my grandfather’s village of Bhikhi every year — and the other in suburban Pennsylvania, learning English from Sesame Street and eating homemade Indian meals every night.
Those annual trips to India were pivotal. It’s where I first learned to cook traditional Punjabi-style food from my grandfather, who passed on his love for our culture, roots, and country of birth through food. Years later, when I had children of my own, I felt a deep need to preserve this connection. What began as a personal project to document our family’s recipes evolved into Indian As Apple Pie.
I eventually left my career as a television journalist and reporter to pursue a lifelong dream: writing an Indian cookbook. Since then, I’ve authored four bestselling titles, launched several Indian product lines, and — my proudest achievement — successfully turned my daughters into foodies.
At its core, Indian As Apple Pie is about making Indian cuisine more accessible. Here you’ll find healthy, flavor-forward recipes, premium Indian products you won’t always find at your local grocer, cooking tips, and so much more — all rooted in tradition, simplified for today, and always made with love.
My cookbooks blend ancestral knowledge of Indian cooking with my journalist’s instinct to make things clear, practical, and approachable. Whether you’re using a slow cooker, Instant Pot, or stovetop, these recipes are easy to follow and designed to fit your lifestyle — vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, or somewhere in between.
Indian cuisine is naturally plant-forward, packed with warming spices, and rooted in thousands of years of tradition that prioritizes balance, flavor, and wellness. These books are designed to help you bring those benefits into your everyday cooking, no matter your skill level or dietary preference.
The Indian spices on the market (or lack thereof) weren’t cutting it for me. I was having a hard time finding quality spices, which are vital to Indian cooking, so I decided to make my own. Over the years, our product line has grown to include spice kits, sauces, and dal (beans, peas, and lentils) — and we’re not done yet! We work directly with top-tier suppliers right here in the U.S. to ensure everything I offer is something I’d use in my own kitchen — no fillers, no salt, no additives.
I’ve dreamed of writing a cookbook ever since I was little, toiling away in my mother’s kitchen under the watchful eye of my grandfather when he visited from India. It just never seemed it could be a reality—especially with two little girls, a husband, and a job that required me to be at work by 3 a.m. I decided to take a break from daily reporting to cook more for my family, and that’s when I was finally able to start the book.
Back in the 1970s, when my mother was an immigrant to this country struggling to balance cooking with her job and raising a young family, she first came across the slow cooker as a way to prepare stews and soups. Eventually, she started to make basic dals and then rajmah (kidney beans) in the slow cooker. She would experiment and then write these recipes down on little 3 x 5 notecards, which my brother and I eventually used as we went off to school and then our careers. In all honesty, I probably lost more of these cards than I held onto—but my persistent, patient mother kept writing those recipes down. Eventually, I created many of my own, too, and thus created this book. I think of it as a tribute to my mother and to other Indian mothers like her, who clung to tradition overso many years so their children could enjoy the legacy of traditional cooking without sacrificing their identities as successful, professional women.
The beauty of slow cooking is that spices have the time to break down and infuse your dish with tons of flavor, essentially eliminating the need for too much oil or even cream. It’s truly amazing that with a cuisine like Indian—where so much emphasis is placed on heating up oil, onions, garlic, ginger, and other spices just so—you can eliminate this step entirely and produce a dish that is as complex and layered with flavor as you would have made by traditional means. And this ability to virtually forego the cream and fat (without sacrificing flavor) means more people can benefit from these recipes.
Hands down, it’s rajmah, the Punjabi equivalent of red beans with rice. The nice thing is that my kids love it as much as my husband and I do.
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