Fun, Food and flavours
A recipe or two, a few women, a kitchen and a cup of tea——-
And hey presto dishes new cooked to perfection.
A few ingredients to make a colourful spread
Sugar overload……. Help!
On Thursday 19th April a group of us gathered at Mina’s lovely home to learn how to cook Indian sweets. Before we began, we drank in the view, had catch-up and get-to-know-you chats, and powered up with coffee and tea.
Thus primed, Mina gathered us together and explained all of the Indian dishes we were to prepare. Many of them had similar ingredients, such as ghee, cardamom, nutmeg and dairy products, but the preparation was different and the results would turn out to be wonderfully varied too (in a good way). Mina gave us a run down of each dish, assigned us all to a recipe and away we went.
We gathered pots and pans, measured, heated, stirred, whizzed and poured. We were correspondingly conscientious, methodical, creative, hopeful and (occasionally, for me at least) a little lost. We shared bench space, stove space and accidentally stole each other’s recipe sheets. There were a few cries of “Is this the tapioca flour?”, “Who’s got the half cup?”, “Here’s some extra cardamom if anyone wants it”, and “Really? All this butter?” but the common underlying cry of the day was, “Mina, can you come and check this?”
It was tremendous fun to get together and learn something that was completely new to most of us. As cooks, we can get tied to the trusty recipes we use every day, so to learn to cook traditional Indian sweets expanded our recipes books, our minds and our cultural horizons. Best of all was the fun of making food together, and then sampling the delicious creations. Yes, the food was ‘calorie dense’ Mina acknowledged, but if a dietician tells you a little bit of something sweet every now and again is acceptable, we were not going to argue.
Thank you, Mina, for sharing your home, your expertise and your heritage with us. We all had a fabulous morning of cooking, friendship and fun.
This is a description of the Indian sweets and desserts cooking morning. It was such fun.
Come again in June ladies.