An Indian feast
Spice school has sadly finished and what fun it's been. Ten weeks of cooking and eating Indian food and learning tricks and tips from an expert, it's been a real joy, I thoroughly recommend it. Our class was small but over the weeks we forgot our initial shyness despite our very different lives. To be honest, this was one of the best things, food brings everyone together. It was hard sometimes, after a demanding day at work, to grab my ingredients and rush back out again in the evening but returning with Tupperware laden with biryanis, kachori, masalas and chutneys made me rather welcome back home. For the last class, we all made a dish and sat down to a feast of food, chatting for the first time about our lives rather than food as we tucked in. It was lovely, the food was delicious and company even better, I'll miss these cooking sessions.
I was tasked with making something sweet and received a recipe for the sweet vermicelli dish meethi seviyan from our tutor, Rashmita This is a simple dish of toasted vermicelli cooked with ghee, jaggery, saffron and cardamom with raisins and pistachios. In preparation for the class I spent several happy hours going through my growing collection of Indian cookery books for advice and opted to make an additional platter of sweetmeats for my fellow students.
I made the sweetmeats the day before the final class so I could use my time making the vermicelli dish on the day. I chose the Gujarati coconut milk fudge from Meera Sodha's Made in India (a really lovely book). As well as being satisfyingly easy to make, these are fabulous, tasting just like the retro chocolate bar Bounty (Meera even mentions coating these in chocolate).
Secondly, and mainly because I had a very large block of jaggery to use, I made ghor papdi - sesame jaggery squares from Prashad, Indian Vegetarian Cooking by Kaushy Patel. This is another very useful and inspiring book with lots of unusual recipes to experiment with. The finished squares are very much like a nutty shortbread, rich with the molasses flavour of jaggery and were very popular with both the class and also my colleagues at work the next day. Jaggery is a dangerous thing to have in the house, its all I can do to stop myself licking the block in its exotic wrapping. Dark and mysterious with hints of toffee, jaggery is supposedly full of healthy minerals but you need to remind yourself that its just a very delicious type of sugar before you devour the whole thing.
Lastly, I made carrot halwa, using this recipe for pumpkin halwa from the BBC. I have made a version of this before and although I loved it, it wasn't so favoured at home, so I was surprised that this was by far the most popular of the three. It may seem odd using vegetables for a sweet dish but carrots are naturally sweet in themselves and its nothing we don't already do in making carrot or courgette cake. The halwa are very moist, look very pretty (especially when you decorate them with very fiddly real gold leaf) and could, at a stretch, count as one of your 5 a day (OK, a real stretch for this last one).
Whilst we were preparing our chosen dishes, excitement grew twinned with a hint of competitiveness and lots of rumbling from empty stomachs. The final table heaved with two pulao rice dishes, onion bhajis hot from the pan, chicken tikka, aloo tikkas, jeera chicken, butternut kachoris, salads and chutney's all washed down with plentiful chai tea. There was barely enough room for my dessert. The meethi seviyan was lovely, comforting and gentle, perfectly complemented by the last minute decision to serve with it some saffron scented skrikhand (sweetened spiced yoghurt). My platter of sweetmeats finished the evening well as we slowly cleared up and wished each other farewell.
I was tasked with making something sweet and received a recipe for the sweet vermicelli dish meethi seviyan from our tutor, Rashmita This is a simple dish of toasted vermicelli cooked with ghee, jaggery, saffron and cardamom with raisins and pistachios. In preparation for the class I spent several happy hours going through my growing collection of Indian cookery books for advice and opted to make an additional platter of sweetmeats for my fellow students.
I made the sweetmeats the day before the final class so I could use my time making the vermicelli dish on the day. I chose the Gujarati coconut milk fudge from Meera Sodha's Made in India (a really lovely book). As well as being satisfyingly easy to make, these are fabulous, tasting just like the retro chocolate bar Bounty (Meera even mentions coating these in chocolate).
Secondly, and mainly because I had a very large block of jaggery to use, I made ghor papdi - sesame jaggery squares from Prashad, Indian Vegetarian Cooking by Kaushy Patel. This is another very useful and inspiring book with lots of unusual recipes to experiment with. The finished squares are very much like a nutty shortbread, rich with the molasses flavour of jaggery and were very popular with both the class and also my colleagues at work the next day. Jaggery is a dangerous thing to have in the house, its all I can do to stop myself licking the block in its exotic wrapping. Dark and mysterious with hints of toffee, jaggery is supposedly full of healthy minerals but you need to remind yourself that its just a very delicious type of sugar before you devour the whole thing.
Lastly, I made carrot halwa, using this recipe for pumpkin halwa from the BBC. I have made a version of this before and although I loved it, it wasn't so favoured at home, so I was surprised that this was by far the most popular of the three. It may seem odd using vegetables for a sweet dish but carrots are naturally sweet in themselves and its nothing we don't already do in making carrot or courgette cake. The halwa are very moist, look very pretty (especially when you decorate them with very fiddly real gold leaf) and could, at a stretch, count as one of your 5 a day (OK, a real stretch for this last one).
Whilst we were preparing our chosen dishes, excitement grew twinned with a hint of competitiveness and lots of rumbling from empty stomachs. The final table heaved with two pulao rice dishes, onion bhajis hot from the pan, chicken tikka, aloo tikkas, jeera chicken, butternut kachoris, salads and chutney's all washed down with plentiful chai tea. There was barely enough room for my dessert. The meethi seviyan was lovely, comforting and gentle, perfectly complemented by the last minute decision to serve with it some saffron scented skrikhand (sweetened spiced yoghurt). My platter of sweetmeats finished the evening well as we slowly cleared up and wished each other farewell.
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