British chef Anjum Anand starts her day at home in London with toast and masala tea, made from her own blend of ginger, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon. This seamless east-west mash-up defines Anand’s cooking, which is rooted in her Indian heritage, peripatetic upbringing, interest in ayurveda and love of healthy vegetarian.

Anand was born in London to firstgeneration Indian immigrants, moved to Switzerland when her father’s job took the family there, and returned to England to go to university where she gained a degree in economics. She later did stints working in Indian kitchens in New York and Los Angeles.

“Growing up in Switzerland was the polar opposite to India. It was calm, there were mountains and fresh air, then I’d walk into our house after school and it felt very Indian. My mother would be playing Indian television while she sat around with ladies wearing bangles, chatting and eating Indian snacks. It was magical.”

It’s this memory of Indian flavours and scents that inspired Anand to ditch her nine-to-five and pursue cooking. “I would come home after work and cook to relax, so I thought, why not focus on it more seriously?” she says. Anand cooked her way through her mother’s repertoire, which is shaped by the family’s Punjabi heritage, experimenting with lighter versions of the often butter-heavy cuisine and taking down recipes as she went, eventually published in her first cookbook, Indian Every Day , in 2003.

The mother of two has published eight cookbooks, appeared on TV in two seasons of Indian Food Made Easy  on the BBC in the UK and Anjum’s Spice Stories on SBS here in Australia, and launched her own range of sauces and chutneys under The Spice Tailor brand, which she co-founded with her husband, Adarsh.

Now Anand is on a mission to show that Indian cooking isn’t fundamentally unhealthy, a misconception, she says perpetuated by Indian restaurants that serve ‘special-occasion’ versions of traditional dishes laced with cream, nut pastes and butter.

“Indian food, like any food, can be unhealthy, but I feel people pigeonhole it in its entirety as unhealthy,” she says. “At its heart, everyday Indian food is peasant food built on vegetables and pulses – whatever people are growing – and my cooking is about showcasing homemade and regional food, which is not the restaurant type.”

As a Hindu-majority country, India has a strong tradition of vegetarianism. You could argue it’s the home of plantbased eating, exporting dhal and aloo gobi long before we considered meatfree Mondays. However, a colourful history of invasions and immigrations have shaped the country’s cuisine into the regional patchwork it is today, and given rise to the richer recipes that perpetuate the ‘unhealthy’ moniker.

Portuguese explorers, for instance, introduced pork to the south, a tradition that lives on in Goa’s pork vindaloo, while the Mughlai cuisine of Uttar Pradesh and Delhi in the north evolved in the royal kitchens of the invading Mughal Empire. It’s built on expensive ingredients such as saffron, dried fruit, nuts and lamb. Biryani, one of the most famed Indian dishes, was born from this cuisine, and while it came into existence as an Indian-Persian dish of steamed rice and meat, the recipe changes from region to region. Communities who lived near the ocean, such as those in the state of Kerala on the Malabar Coast, make it with rice and fish, while in Bombay it’s made with chicken, vegetarian cooks sub the meat for chickpeas, and poorer households have adapted the recipe using potatoes.

“Biryani is proper Indian party food,” says Anand, adding that while the rich, haute cuisine versions define the experience many have in restaurants today, “no one would ever eat that every day at home”.

As we take a mental trip around the country, Anand fires off examples of more “healthy dishes”, from the sweetsour curries of north-west Punjab built on a base of ginger, tomatoes and onion to the vegetarian cuisine of Gujarat, the state famous for its vegetarian thali  (a platter loaded with an assortment of dishes and chutneys served with roti).

“Gujaratis do wonderful things with veg and have 100 ways of using lentils,” she says. They include slow-cooked lentil dhal, spongy dhokla savoury cakes made from a fermented batter of ground pulses, fried onion bhaji made from chickpea flour, and puran puli, flatbreads stuffed with a lentil purée sweetened with jaggery (unrefined sugar).

Michelin-starred French chef Alain Passard, who took meat off his menu at Paris fine-diner L’Arpège in 2001, said, “There is a creativity with vegetables you don’t have with animal tissue.”

Ironically, this creativity with vegetables is rooted in the necessity of peasant cuisines. Enter Indian regional home cooking, where staples such as potatoes, tomatoes, onions, leafy greens, legumes and pulses are combined with chilli, spices and perhaps a dollop of yoghurt or a little paneer.

Anand’s desert-island ingredient reflects this. “Lentils. Because you can make a starter, a side, a main, flatbreads with them. You can make savoury cakes, and dessert. That’s why I think regional Indian cuisines are so interesting because you see cooks using the same humble ingredient in so many ways and changing it from one day to the next.”

Try Anjum’s recipes from her latest cookbook ‘I Love India’, including ‘The best tarka dal’   and ‘Mixed vegetable kadhai’.