Book excerpt: Ammas.com is the world's largest and most successful Asian food and lifestyle website, audited at over two million hits per month. Amma (which means Mother in many south Asian languages) is a south Indian housewife and grandmother who began sending recipes to her children over the internet when they went overseas, but missed their mother's cooking. From this simple beginning Ammas.com has grown to encompass a complex, fascinating and award-winning website offering among many other services, over 5000 Indian recipes. This is a collection of some of those recipes, which do away with pestle and mortar and tandoor ovens, replacing them with coffee grinders, microwaves and food processors. In addition, it offers ancedotes of Indian village life which convey the warmth, love and traditional values of Amma's village upbringing.