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!!

10. Take a foreign cooking class

This was a rather unexpected thing that we ticked off my list - but it is one of my favourites so far! :) My Love, my parents, and I all attended a cooking class in Palo Alto! It was called the ‘Date Night: Italian Feast’ cooking class held at the Sur La Table store, and we made the following:

     Arugula and Fennel Salad with Blood Orange Dressing

     Osso Buco with Citrus-Herb Gremolata served with Creamy Parmesan Polenta

     Mascarpone Semifreddo with Caramelized Apples

*drool* I am salivating just remembering it! It was so much fun, we learned about the different types of utensils and kitchenware we were using, I even picked up some awesome tips for egg whites which will hopefully help with my Pavlova technique! They are:

•     When making meringue (or pavlova one assumes) to get more volume just leave the egg whites out over night before you start working with them - she explained how that works, I might find out why and update this later


•     The alcohol content in vanilla essence can have a negative effect on the crust of your meringue (again; or pavlova one assumes) - to ensure that you have a delicious crunchy crust use vanilla paste instead!

It was SO much fun and I learned so much. It did, however, increase my lusting after a stand-mixer, not even bringing into the equation how much cheaper Kitchenaid stand mixers are in America than they are in New Zealand! *wimper* …. my time for a stand mixer will come, I hope!

The course was fantastic and you walk away with an awesome experience under your belt as well as a booklet with the recipes you used. Also that store is HEAVEN for any foodies, we spent a half hour wandering around the store before our cooking was served up for dinner, and my goodness! Every 30 seconds I had found something new I wanted to buy, unfortunately three of our party were about to fly away so there was not nearly enough suitcase space for all of the things we wanted. I bought my Love a nice sharp kitchen knife after doing battle with the ones in his kitchen for the previous week or so. Even my Dad (Dr. “glacé-cherries-would-go-great-in-an-omelette”) had a good time, and learned some new tips and tricks that might re-spark his culinary talents (he’s not bad - just out of practise I think), but that remains to be seen.

I think I will do another one when I am heading back for the fourth of July. I spent two days after the class just trawling through the cooking classes and stumbled across their Culinary Vacations, where you pay XXXX amount of dollars and it covers hotels and cooking classes and tastings in New York, or London, or a few other places (airfares not included), they are VERY expensive for our budget, but my goodness, a girl can dream!

I will take more pictures of our creations next time, it completely slipped my mind!