“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 learns the skills that were passed on to them from their own mothers. Power 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 and a definition of what it means to be a woman today.

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.

Nani Power’s concept is smart and simple. Place an ad on Craigslist for Indians interested in teaching this middle aged, divorced mother of two how to cook proper Indian meals. But right from the beginning, it’s clear the book is struggling for compelling content and the author is grasping at straws to deliver enough storyline to fill a hardcover printing.

The first 19 pages are a jumbled mess of ideas from Ms Power’s long interest in cooking & longing for new foods to relationships, love, Feminism, spices and the Indian God Ganesh. Readers are repeatedly reminded how she is struggling to make ends meet on her writer salary all the while telling herself she is content at being alone (yet speaks about love and relationships incessantly). Add in the simple fact the author has not traveled to India, and it’s hard to keep an unbiased opinion throughout the pages.

The recounting of her shared cooking experiences, the crux of the book, comes off as lightweight fodder. More detail into the lives of each teacher is lacking, a shame given the chance to learn so much more than just a recipe. As a writer, you would think Ms Power would be delving into a laundry list of conversation starters with her hosts, but she backs away stating her concern for Indian etiquette and customs.

Half way into the book an odd love story-arc is introduced. Clearly designed to keep female readers interested, the gist of her love for Indian food has now translated into an interest in Indian men. And as much as the 48 year old Ms Power professes countless times not to be a cougar, her relationship with a 20 something Indian college student appears to be nothing short of a codependent train wreck that both parties can’t walk away from. The retelling of their nights of fighting, yelling, and unending phone calls proves to be as interesting as watching water boil.

Each teacher flits in and out of the author’s life quicker than Uncle Ben’s instant rice is finished. Although she writes as if it is the Indian women who move on or create obstacles to keep up the lessons, Ms Power’s self mentioned past bares some weight in the failing of these relationships.

While a great idea, Ginger and Ganesh would have been better off as a brilliantly written magazine article or Sunday newspaper cover story. Instead, the bloated storyline is distracted with too much talk of not wanting to bring women back into the kitchen even as she admits it would be beneficial to the household on many levels. Oddly lost are her kids who are only briefly mentioned as guinea pigs during her Indian culinary crusade. Ms Power ultimately discovers that life with a young Indian man, however dysfunctional, is better than no relationship. And Ganesh, well he’s just there as a symbol she seeks throughout the cooking lessons as a sign of comfort. It makes for a catchy title.

Ginger and Ganesh is a basket full of crazy which left me feeling sorry for the families who endured their time with the author. Skip this title if for nothing else, the bargain bin 1000 Greatest Indian Recipes found at nearly every corner bookshop.