Jim's Night: Passage to India

Our official menu tonight:

Indian Summer Stew
Palak Paneer (Paneer recipe is from Artisan Cheese Making at Home)
Jim's Curry Chocolate Cake

Hello!

Welcome back, dear reader(s). Deb here, on blogging (and sitting-on-my-ass) duty. Tonight we're testing out a menu that Jim put together and I'm super excited to hear that it is Indian food, because that is one of my favorites. Just to add some suspense to the evening, I'll tell ya that I've been on a juice diet again since our last Cooking Club, and I'm determined tonight to NOT eat everything in the house, as I did last week.... we'll see how that goes. While the guys are chopping vegetables, we have to catch up on movies. Jim LOVED 21 Jump St, which totally makes me want to see it. Alex says I will appreciate it because it is a comedy of non-stop dick jokes ( Brian recently revealed that my sense of humor runs that way). Bri also exposed that I hated the movie Bridesmaids, so I had to explain to the room full of horrified people that I cannot handle the social humiliation movies. I don't have the courage to get through the awkward scenes. I think I bailed when the main character went up to give her second toast. Remember that part? My tastes are far more stress-free than that-- I really want to see John Carter, for example-- "the biggest flop of the year," as Jim puts it. But my sci-fi lovin' friends loved it, and you got trust them more than reviewers, right? Right?

Appetizers
Our first course should really be called Cheating and comes courtesy of Brian who stopped at the Australian meat pie place down the street (KO). The miniature meat pies (for Bri and Jim) and veggie roll (for Alex) were tasty and I'm sure helped take their usual feral hunger down a notch. Me? I'm drinking a spinach kale juice and still feeling virtuous.

Main Course

While the guys are hard at work chopping onions, our guest star Sarah walks in with Rommy! It's nice to have her here for her witty conversation, but also, she's taking care of dessert for us. :) Sarah, Jim and Alex spent the day at Craft Boston on the Seaport which sounds like it was a great time. Sarah bought these cool earrings and a t-shirt.

Rommy, the big sweetie, has taken up his usual position Right In Our Way, so everyone is carefully stepping over him as we go on. Dogs always win in our kitchen.

We're going to make our own cheese tonight!

"What are these two things, cocoa powder and butter?" Sarah interrupts, confusing everyone in the room, since she had just been talking knowledgeably about the baking properties of gluten. I still don't know what she could have meant (I was too busy writing it down.). But that's how I find out we're having chocolate cake for dessert! My juice is getting less appetizing as the evening goes on...

Sarah is almost done with the cake and the guys have barely gotten started on anything...oh, they are waiting for the milk to heat up for the paneer. It's taking forever, it's 5 quarts of milk and they're supposed to heat it up slowly. Alex is waiting for the frozen butternut squash to simmer so he has time to explain to me the traditional Indian method of making a stew which consists of simmering a bunch of vegetables together and then in a separate pan, frying up the spices to add to the stew later at the end. On the left, you see the beginnings of the Palak that Jim is making: onions and tomatoes and spices. It smells delicious already.




 Dessert
This chocolate cake is advanced, yo. I just watched Sarah put ginger and coconut milk into it. I finally got a hold of the recipe- it's from... somewhere online, but it turns out that Jim has reworked the whole thing anyway. He is testing his entry into the Food Experiments, which is an actual food competition here in Boston. Jesus, I'm watching Alex POUR GARAM MASALA AND CAYENNE PEPPER INTO OUR CHOCOLATE CAKE BATTER right now. Wow. Does it get crazier than that? This cake is intense. In fact, after Sarah put the cake in the oven, I was surprised to see that there are 2 more pages of instructions to follow.

"

Meanwhile, Brian is impatiently waiting for the milk to curdle and it is not happening. We might just be eating Palak Without Paneer tonight....No! they added some more vinegar and lemon juice than the recipe called for and it is slowly coagulating. After getting to 195 degrees, Brian will let it ripen for 5 minutes and then carefully ladle the cheese into muslin to drain. It drains for 20 minutes and then we press it and, finally, cut it into blocks of paneer.


A discussion ensued about why we write this blog. My original intent was to to create a record of our cooking adventures just to help us remember what worked and what didn't work, but it turns out Brian, Alex and Jim want to write a cookbook and become rich and famous. [Brian here to correct a huge misrepresentation--I just want to become famous.  I'll settle for rich, though.]

The kitchen is starting to smell sooo good. I can feel my hunger levels rising...were-Deb is coming out...soon they'll see fangs...   Jim is finishing up the Palak and Sarah is making cream cheese frosting for the cake...apparently massamam curry paste is going into our frosting! I tasted it, it was hot. Not sexy hot, burn your tongue hot. Hot frosting!




Waiting...

This meal is taking forever. We forgot to put the lentils in early enough, so we're waiting for them to get cooked and the paneer needs to be pressed for a half an hour (after draining for 20 minutes). We actually had time to clean up the whole kitchen before we ate, which never happens on our Cooking Club nights.  OMG, so hungry....

Finally! Here's the way everything looked at the end...you have to imagine the cake fully frosted, because we forgot to get a final picture of the cake. Jim face here expresses how we all feel about this...

Reviews

	Alex	Brian	Deb	Jim
Palak Paneer	B It needed different seasoning. It wasn't salty enough, maybe, ?	A- Proud of how good it came out.	A Didn't exactly taste like Indian restaurant palak paneer, but it was quite tasty. It tastes like hippy co-op Palak Paneer.	B+ Tasty
Summer Stew	B+ The recipe is awesome. It was so flavorful...I think it was the mustard seeds, and other spices at the end.	B- I think we should leave out the lentils next time.	B+ This would be a good recipe to keep working on. I thought it was almost perfect. I didn't think the lentils were too crunchy.	B- Crunchy lentils suck
Dessert	B+ Maybe I'm easy [room erupts in laughter], but I thought it was good. Nice flavor. I value novelty really highly and this was very unexpected.	C Combination of flavors didn't work for me.	B I loved the curry accents. I think they could have been even stronger.	B It's got a lot of potential.The consistency of the icing could be improved.

Farscape, Season 2, Episode 7: Home on the Remains. 
Brian: OMG, the name of the main villain was a shout out to Boss Hogg from Dukes of Hazzard.
Deb: It was flat out awful.
Alex: Ciana the ho.
Jim: Australians trying to do US southern accents, goes beyond funny to just plain sad.

Farscape: Season 2, Episode 8
So depressed from the complete crappy-ness of the earlier episode, we decided that we couldn't face the next one, which looked even worse. A planet of lawyers. Really? Sarah bolted, probably thinking the rest of us were crazy for putting ourselves through this misery every week. The rest of us began to argue about whether we should ditch the whole Farscape series. Brian and I have seen most of the series before and we promised it would get better. Deep inside, though, even we were worried. Does it get better? Or were our tastes just really that crappy all those years ago? I argued that we should skip all the episodes that look like boring filler, but it turns out that the episode where everyone switches bodies (which strikes the rest of us as an awful premise)  is one of Brian's favorites... Soooo, we'll have to figure this out next week. It's a time of deep reflection in the Deep Space Cooking Club.