21. Take another cooking class

I'm already ticking them off the 26 before 26 list! I went to another cooking class with my Love in Palo Alto! We attended a class called Indian Home Cooking held at Sur La Table. When we lived in New Zealand we had Curry Sunday locked in every Sunday on our Google calendars. I think it started as a "let's cook something from a different nationality every Sunday" thing - but we started with Indian and never seemed to move on from it! We would visit our local Indian spice market to buy the things we needed and we got pretty good at our favourite curries. We never really mastered the breads, there were these delicious ones you could buy and just heat up in a frying pan quickly *drooling daydream*. Anyway, we really miss curry Sunday so we chose Indian Home Cooking .. That explanation probably didn't need to be so long!

The menu:
Curried Vegetable Samosas with Mango-Cilantro Chutney 
Chicken Tikka Masala with Cucumber-Mint Raita 
Coconut Vegetable Curry with Cashews 
Chapati Bread (Indian Flatbread)

We started off making curried vegetable samosas, I think that the pastry on a few of them was a little thick, but none of them burst in the deep-frying process, so we did okay! A few people left a little air in their samosas which caused them to start to inflate a little in the hot oil. One thing that we learned was that, if you deep fry things on a regular basis, you can pour the hot oil through a coffee filter to clear out the crap and reuse it! Obviously you want to be careful about what type of container you collect it in, because the hot oil will warp plastic. 

Deep frying is terrifying, I'm not sure I will ever be comfortable standing next to boiling hot oil. 

The rest was pretty straight forward really, though I'm still not confident with my Chapati bread making skills, I was happy enough with it for that night! The curries weren't as spicy as we were used to but they were still delicious, and we know how to spice them up next time we make them at home. They give you the recipes to take away and a 10% discount voucher to use if you see anything that you want to buy in the store during the break. We looked seriously at the knives and the sous vide they had in store, but decided against them in the end. 

This last photo is a bit blurry sorry ... I was a bit too eager to eat it all!! It was delicious!!