believe it or not, moi here, attended a cooking class at central market and on indian cuisine at that!
first of all, central market is a one-stop shop, high-end grocery with extensive selections of fresh vegetables and hard-to-find ingredients, an impressive long aisles of wine bottles, unbelievable cheese selection, astounding varieties of fresh meat and fish and so much more. aside from that, the place is just bursting with activity from cooking classes, curb-side concerts, food festivals and rare guest appearances from food network’s popular chefs. parking space is not available until much later in the evening were most of the crowd has dispersed, it’s that hard to even maneuver the parking lot because of the busy traffic flow in and out of the grocery with people rushing with their carts.
for my attending physician’s birthday treat, we took him out to a cooking class. he’s someone who’s passionate about food - so a foodie like him would truly enjoy a rare indian cooking class like this. and boy, he did. our instructor that evening was suneeta vaswani, a well-known cooking instructor who has published numerous recipe books and a successful business woman. as she held our undivided attention, we did hands-on cooking on special end of summer popular indian recipes. my partner colleen and i, were tasked to prepare savory indian bread pudding. it’s buttermilk dipped bread layered with tomato marsala and onions seasoned with mustard seeds and chilies. it’s an unexpectedly easy dish to prepare.
dr.y with antonella and amy, we’re assigned to make tricolored bell peppers with crushed peanuts. their dish was the longest to prepare but was voted the best for the evening. other recipes made were : corn pakoras, sheilu’s pan fried yogurt chicken, smoky eggplant puree and lastly the dessert, sweet saffron yogurt cheese. all simple to prepare but as we’ve learned, patience with slow cooking is the key to indian cuisine. they value the importance of infusing all the flavor and aroma of the hundreds of spices added to a bare vegetable or meat. the mixture of textures and colors are key elements for an indian dish. their patience is eminent to achieve a victorious concocted indian meal.
in the end, the birthday boy just got his wish - to attend a fun hands-on cooking class again (we did italian cuisine last year) and to get to try all the food we made with a non-stop flow of fine pinot noir as part of what we paid for. as a party favor, we get to take home rare herbs and spices (e.g. fenugreek) and a whole bundle of green onion garlic.
if you’re interested on any of the recipes we did, pls.comment and i’ll send them your way.
