If you like Indian food but don’t like spending hours shopping for spices or tracking down hard to find ingredients, Madhur Jaffrey makes it easy for you. Her new cookbook, “At Home with Madhur Jaffrey: Simple, Delectable Dishes from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, & Sri Lanka” (Alfred A. Knopf, $35), starts with simpler recipes and uses a smaller palette of spices, so you can get a taste of South Asian cuisine without spending hours in the kitchen. The spinach and ginger soup perfumed with cloves from Sri Lanka requires only a hot green chile, some fresh ginger, cloves and a few peppercorns. Jaffrey also suggests dishes that can be served as accompaniments to Western foods: the ground turkey with Hyderabadi seasonings can be served with hot corn tortillas and a salsa. She even shows you how to dress up a can of beans with Indian spices.

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