Staycation Notes: An Indian cooking class

Why do I look so intense? I'm grating ginger for goodness sake!

About two weeks ago now, Zack and I went on Staycation. I told you we were going, but haven't had a chance yet to tell you all about it. I figure, when I want to blog but don't have something more immediate to tell you, I'll go back to those wonderful five days and relive one of our adventures.

Today I give you, our cooking class evening at the Blue Ribbon Cooking School. This was the first time Zack and I had taken a cooking class together and I was so excited. The cooking school is located on the Lake Union waterfront, just off Eastlake. We arrived a bit early and helped ourselves at the self-service bar. It was set up with a wide variety of wines and some Indian inspired cocktails. The Ginger Cosmo for me and a Tamarind Cocktail for Zack. The school is quite large with a demonstration kitchen, dining area and reception space, as well as an open air deck where we sat and sipped our libations in the evening sun. Before long, there were thirty of us and class was in session.

Our instructor had lived for seven years in India and spoke with authority on the dishes, as well as a lot of humor. She got us started right to work making vegetable samosas and explaining the basic elements of Indian cuisine, including some of the unique ingredients essential to it. After about fifteen minutes, we reviewed the evenings menu and broke into teams to cook. If you don't know much about cooking technique, this would be a bit of a shock, because it was basically, "here's your recipe, here's your ingredients, now whip up your dish and we'll all eat it for dinner!" Zack and I joined forces with a woman in her 50's who had never eaten Indian food before in her life. I took charge. We made vegetable pulao, which is the saffron and garam masala scented rice often served with saucy meat dishes. This recipe was also studded with lots of great vegetation. The kitchen was quite a bustle as we all tripped over each other cooking our dishes. The resulting buffet was all good, although some dishes much better than others. We met a lot of fun people, the comradery was thick and after dinner spread we just about rolled out of the place. Here are just a few of the items the group made and my heaping plate...of seconds!


You may find this absurd, but I expected to come away from the class inspired to plan and throw long Indian dinner parties in our home. In these daydreams, I saw Zack and I working together on the meal and it being known that our "thing" was to cook Indian dinners in tandem for our blessed guests. I often create lofty ideas like this for my culinary forays. We enjoyed the class, but walked away relatively unchanged. Imagine that - NOT transformed by a three hour cooking class. What a shocker. :) Indian food is wonderful, and we'll enjoy it for lazy evenings of take-out and movies as we always have, but its not something I'm really inspired to cook at home. I think my culinary heart is pretty much trapped between Northern France and Southern Italy and I need to come to terms with that. All the same, it was a fabulous evening and worth every penny. I highly recommend it.