One thing on we were hoping to do on our travels around India was to do a cooking class. The Lonely Planet recommended a lady in Udaipur who ran ‘enthusiastic’ lessons from her small kitchen below a local restaurant. At a pretty bargain price compared to others we’d seen we decided to give her a call. Not wanting to take our names but with the instructions to ‘come hungry’ we were signed up and ready to cook.
We arrived at Shashi’s house – a small room with a small kitchen at 5.30pm. We were joined by two other tourists from Belgium who like everyone else she gets business from, had also read the Lonely Planet. Shashi introduced herself, she’d been running the classes for two years and at the beginning she didn’t speak any English. Her English was pretty good 2 years on, she isn’t able to read or write English, but a previous visitor to her class had written down all the recipes and typed them out so we had them all to hand… a whole 9 pages of them. It was starting to become clear as to why we needed to come hungry!
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We started off with Masala tea, the sweet spicy tea you get every where in India. After that we moved onto the entrée of Pakoras, deep fried balls containing different ingredients. First we started with onion pakora and potato pakoras, after eating those we moved on to mix veg pakoras and paneer pakoras. We also made a mango dip and a corriander dip to go with them.
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By this stage we were starting to get quite full already! Then we learnt how to make a Masala sauce which was to be the base of a curry, we decided on a aloo mater (a potato and pea curry) this was followed by a veg pilau.
We then moved on to making an array of breads – chapatti, naan, parathas (as well as stuffed and sweet ones). She also explained how to make Paneer and curd and Mark got some tips on making lime pickle.
After 4 ½ hours of cooking we sat down to eat. There was so much food and after eating along the way our appetites couldn’t quite match the amount of food. With some chapattis in a doggy bag we went on our way, it will be a while before we have a kitchen to cook in but we’ll have some great recipes to hand when we do!
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