My Curry Cooking Class Day

Just had a great curry cooking day with Geeta  at the Delish cookery school in Bristol and learned a lot about authentic Indian cooking.

We shared out the recipes which included: a chicken curry, a vegetable curry, samosas, pakoras and chapatis and then all took home a little bit of each of the dishes.  It was great to go to the fridge the next day for lunch and find all these wonderful, cooked goodies that I could just heat up. Hooray!

We learned about the different spices used in Indian cookery and, something I hadn’t fully appreciated, the right time to add them to the dish. The powders need to go in earlier at the frying-the-onions stage and the fresher spices later. If you find that you haven’t added enough fresh chilli when you taste towards the end, you can always add a bit of cayenne pepper to ramp up the taste-kick. I am always a bit cautious with chilli as I don’t like it too hot but fresh chillis can vary so much in strength that sometimes it is hard to tell how much is enough so this was a good tip.

Geeta also told us about her mother’s tip for making up a batch of minced garlic and ginger (staples of Asian cooking) and freezing some for easy use in the future – she puts them in to an ice-cube tray! I thought that this idea would work well for when we want to take some away with us to use in the campervan but freeze a portion in a small plastic bag rather than an ice-cube tray.

This was also the first time I had made chapatis which were easier than I thought although there is definitely an art to rolling them out and eventually ending up with a round one rather than one that looks a bit like a splat! However, I really like the way that they puff up when you are cooking them.

Geeta also made us some gorgeous chai tea which was made from normal tea simmered in a pan with milk, fennel, cardamon and sugar. Delicious and so good for you as fennel is particularly  good for our digestive systems.

It was a really fun day  and Geeta is great at making it seem easy and I came away with a much better understanding of what makes a good curry. I can’t wait to try it out when we are away in Trev-the-Prev our campervan.

For more information on Geeta’s Indian cookery classes see: www.delishcook.co.uk