We had only 6 guests and therefore fewer courses than first imagined, but all the right ones appeared. First up, vegan samosas with homemade dough, stuffed with potatoes and peas and carrots, and accompanied by a homemade tamarind sauce. Wowza!
Next course was mine: sweet potato koftas and indian salad. Here's how it went: GREEN GRAVY, first off. Wha? That's a "gravy" made of peas and cilantro and green pepper and garlic.
Last time I made it, peppercorns were accidentally substituted for mustard seeds. Oops! Mustard seeds are a lot different, let me tell you! The cool thing about mustard seeds is that they blow up; you need to keep a lid on it, or you can have a little shower of boiling hot oil seeds hit your face... But if performed correctly, toasting mustard seeds is go00000od. Then there were the koftas: sweet potatoes and peas and lots and lots of garlic.
The way they work is that you cook the sweet potatoes and you mash them and then you mix in the mixins and some flour. Then you put little balls of them on your cookie tray and cook them and they puff up. The first time, they really puffed up like little sweet potato dough balls. This time, they really didn't puff up; but they were still garlicky and potatoey and sweety and peay. They were really good. Like this:
I also made the standard Indian salad with raita: tomatoes, cucumber, onion, and raita, which is a yogurt sauce. I used soy yogurt (soygurt?). The weirdest thing is that soygurt is yogurty! Really, you'd never know! There are cultures and everything! I would have expected soygurt as compared to yogurt to taste like silk as compared to milk (i.e. nothing alike). But other than the fact that it's that telltale tan hue, soygurt is really quite yogurty. What I'd like to know is where those cultures come from.... something about "natural flora" makes me a little ill. But I digress: bacteria are our friends, and soygurt is the vegan alternative to infesting our intestines. Yum!
The hosts (the vegan cupcacke hosts, who are so darned talented!) made nan. Who makes nan? They do!
The first time I experienced the nan, they made it at my house and it smoked up like crazy. It was delicious, but my house smelled like a bonfire for days. Which is totally OK--I mean, as long as you are into that whole woodlands thing (whatevs). This time, however, they figured out the smoke factor and made it perfectly. O god it's good. It's heavy, and salty, and doughy, but also has this incredible crisp edge. The iron skillet is the key, so they say, so they say.
The entree was korma. You can never go wrong with korma. But here's the amazing thing: the korma cooks just made it up! Some of this and a little of that and voila--ten tons of veggie korma. Complete with mushrooms and tomatos and beans and peppers and potatoes and almonds and I don't even know what else. I don't even know. And the basmati rice was cooked with cinnamon sticks and peppercorns (avoid those because they pack some flava!). That makes it so much more special; who knew rice could be so much more than rice?
After all this, of course, we weren't hungry. But we had ( WE HAD ) to stuff ourselves, if only in honor of all the little piggies and cows that didn't die or get their teats squeezed on our account, so we ate the dessert, too. The chefs called it padawakana or something, which turns out not to be Indian, but rather just some sort of cobbler made with with mango. It was delicious! Who cares about themes anyway?! As long as it's vegan, we're not picky.That's the food story. But here's the back story: wait, I can't tell you. It's against VSC rules to share the ins goings on of these events. So just enjoy the food and pictures and stay tuned for another adve[gan]ture!!
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