Watching Padma Lakshmi as she prepares to go before a camera lens is ...

Tag : Madras Curry Powder

Watching Padma Lakshmi as she prepares to go before a camera lensis like observing the composition of a signature dish at a finerestaurant. Many hands are involved, each one assigned to anunthinkably small task of extreme precision. Instead of paintingplates with delicate reductions and positioning microgreens atoptowers of protein, they're painting the contours of her back withjust the right shade of cinnamon brown and positioning her thick,black hair in waves that make it look like a dark, bottomless sea.When the camera starts clicking, no fewer than 13 people havecontributed to dressing and coiffing and making up thismultifaceted entrée, this model/actress/culinary diva.

I'm standing innocently and uselessly aside, watching this all godown in a photo studio in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Then Padmacocks her head over her shoulder and casts a deep, sultry starethat stabs me in the chest like a 10-inch chef's knife. Her eyessoften and her lips curl into a sly smile: "If only I had this manyfluffers in the kitchen. I'd have them poof up my salads."

If Padma's really looking for help tousling her arugula, I'm sure Icould work something out. After all, she may be one of the greatestcatches of the new millennium. Padma speaks five languages and haslived and worked in more countries than most people can pick out ona map. She has an award-winning cookbook and one of the mostpopular cooking shows on cable ( Top Chef ), and her ex-husband is one of the greatest writers of the 20thcentury. She is 15 IQ points smarter than the average human andthree heart palpitations more beautiful than the averagesupermodel, with soft, cappuccino skin, deep, burrowing eyes, andmore pleasing curves and stunning vistas than the Pacific CoastHighway.

But the one thing Padma doesn't have, something she's never had, isa man who treats her right in the kitchen. "Guys don't cook forme," she'll tell you, with the dejected look of a little girl whojust lost her puppy to a fur trader. "I don't know why that is."Maybe it's her well-documented prowess with a spatula and a spicecabinet, or the fact that as executioner on Top Chef , she makes a living castrating very capable cooks with hertrademark death blow: "Please pack your knives and go."

No matter. What's important is that in her search for a man who'llcook for her, Padma has offered hope to every man who has everdreamed of dating out of his league. The way to this woman's heart-- maybe any woman's heart -- is through the sensual red zone knownas the kitchen.

So now I have a mission, which I undertake for the benefit ofmankind: to find out what to feed an exotic creature like Padma.It's a quest worth pursuing on behalf of a woman who has spent mostof her life adrift, driven in equal measure by wanderlust and foodlust. To chart the evolution of both, I'll present her in banquetform: Padma, a lifetime in four courses. I think your appetite willincrease with each one.

First Course: Stinky Curry and a Liter of Milk
Born in India and transplanted to New York with her mom by the ageof 4, Padma spent her earliest years divided between the solitudeof a single-parent apartment in Manhattan and the buzz of anoverstuffed household in the city of Chennai (formerly Madras),where a dozen family members were in residence at any given time.

"All of the action of the house was in the kitchen," she notes."All the decisions were made there, all the family secretsrevealed." It was in that kitchen, where sights and sounds ofcooking seasoned every major event, that Padma fell in love withfood. Her new cookbook, Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet , largely reflects those early, heady times spent in the kitchen --from cauliflower roasted with a pinch of anise seed to crusty pitachips dusted with sumac powder.

"You can have very simple food with those light, subtlebrushstrokes of flavor," she says, recalling her childhood, "andyour cooking can have a delicacy and a very sophisticated qualitywithout being fussy."

But when she shuttled back to New York, the smells and tastes ofher motherland didn't win her any friends. In American classrooms,Padma was that exotic girl with the weird lunches.
"Being from India wasn't that cool when I was young," she recalls."My classmates would show up with these very neatpeanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut off and Iwould show up with this very pungent curry, and they'd be, like,'Ewww, that's gross!' Kids are cruel."

As if curry isn't hard enough for American kids to comprehend,Padma was also from a strict vegetarian household. She didn't haveher first bite of meat until seventh grade.
"My mom would make me drink four 8-ounce glasses of milk a day forprotein," she says. "To this day, one of my favorite things is anice cold glass of milk at midnight."


Go to the next page for three more courses of Padma...