April 17: Indian Cooking Class!

Paul and I went to the Indian cooking class on Sunday night with several of his colleagues and their significant others. We had a great time. The class was held at Naveen's Cuisine, which is just a few blocks away from our place.

Disclaimer: we realized 45 minutes after we arrived, that we forgot the camera at home. Paul took these photos with his phone, but I think they'll give you a sense of what we did. Let's be honest, our regular photos aren't that good anyways!

The menu that I posted before was what we ended up cooking. The first photos are of the shrimp tikkas. Paul and two others helped butterfly the raw shrimp. Chef Naveen added the spices, and Paul mixed everything together.

Lots of hand-washing was going on.

After the spices were mixed in, we added the shrimp to a grill pan in batches. Each batch probably cooked for about 5 minutes, until all the gray was gone from the shrimp.

I think we asked more questions about the industrial size stove and hood than we did the shrimp. It was pretty awesome.  

The final product is shown below. They were delicious. Several people in our group took turns cooking the remaining batches.

Chef Naveen helped us prep the other items -- the chicken curry (which is not pictured until the end), the mixed vegetable salad, the chili paneer (also not pictured until the end), and began ka bharta (the eggplant dish).  We did a lot of chopping and prepping the different vegetables and spices for the dishes. Chef Naveen talked through a lot of the common spices used in Indian cooking, and showed us some techniques to chopping garlic, peeling ginger, and coring peppers.

The ladies got to work on peeling and chopping cucumbers for the salad.

Bertha and Nick worked on chopping radishes, also for the salad.

I mixed up the salad, which included cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes, red onion, cilantro, lime juice and spices. There may have been other ingredients that I missed. I was on glass two of wine.

Chef Naveen had roasted the eggplant in the oven to make the began ka bharta. We peeled the eggplants, chopped off the stem end, and then coarsely chopped/mashed the eggplant.

Chef Naveen peels the eggplant, while Maureen looks on.

After chopping the eggplant, Jessie adds it to the pan.

You can see the eggplant mixture (with the lid off). The largest pan has the chili paneer, and the pan in the back has the chicken curry simmering away.



The completed mixed vegetable salad. It was delicious and fresh -- the dressing was only lime juice and cilantro; no oil was added.

Everything came together to eat right at the same time. We had been cooking as a group for probably two hours, but I'm sure things move faster when you're cooking for less than 12 and when your sous-chefs aren't all distracted by conversation and wine.

A photo of my (heaping) plate is below. I thought everything was absolutely delicious. The food was nice and spicy, but not so overwhelming that you can't taste the individual flavors. I am totally in love with the mixed vegetable salad. I would eat a gallon of that a day. I also really liked the chili paneer, and look forward to making that. I've never had it with peppers -- only with spinach, so I really liked the slightly crunchy peppers with the softened paneer. 


From the bottom left corner going clockwise: curry chicken on basmati rice, chili paneer, began ka bharta and the mixed vegetable salad. The shrimp didn't make it past 6:30 p.m.



Chef Naveen sends out the recipes after the class, so I'm really looking forward to recreating these items at home. My makeshift chicken curry from last week wasn't bad, but I definitely learned some new ideas to incorporate next time!

Follow up note: I have been teased mercilessly about this post. Apparently my narration of our cooking class is not okay. I was told (and I quote), "You wrote something like, 'and then Jessie adds the eggplant into the pan.' i mean, what the hell is that?"  Um, what happened? Seems awfully judgey there, my over-the-shoulder blog reviewer.