Cooking is new territory for me. The only reason I started cooking in the first place was because I got tired of the Indian food I was eating daily and craved a variation in cuisine and flavours. Once again, this is a limitation in a small town. I can't opt to go for a pizza or a coffee simply because there is no place to go to ... no "joint to hang out in" so to speak. So the next best thing to do -- make what you want to eat at your own home.
In the days and the world of Google, looking up recipes is no big deal. I find that you get very easy to make and easy to follow recipes of a very wide variety on http://cooks.ndtv.com/ and http://allrecipes.com/. These are my go to sites for any cuisine that I want to try out, my favourites being Italian and continental. Ofcourse, when I am looking for a specific dish anything that pops up on Google will do as long as it is easy to follow and the ingredients are available in my little town.
So when I decided to host a party I decided that instead of the usual North Indian fare I would try something different. I decided to serve Chinese! Unbeknownst to my guests, they were going to be the Guinea Pigs in my experimental Chinese cuisine. So after a lot of research on the net, I decided on a menu that included cauliflower manchurian, crispy fried spinach, crispy chilly lamb, chicken in lemon sauce, noodles and rice and finally end with my mother's recipe for hot chocolate fudge (always a big hit at parties thrown previously at my home). It does sound like a rather complete menu doesn't it? Now the task at hand was to actually make these dishes edible!
So after a long long day of slaving over the stove (yes it took me the entire day and I finally understood what my mum went through every time she had to cater to parties!!!!! I am amazed how people manage to make food in such short periods of time!) I finally got all the dishes ready just in time to have a quick shower and be ready to welcome the guests.... and for the final moment of truth!
Well of course, no guest was going to tell me how terribly rotten my food was. I also believe that I can be quite a strong and accurate critic of my own work. In my humble opinion, the dinner was quite a decent success. The lamb was the lowest point of the meal (too tough to chew even though the flavours were okay) and the dessert was the high point of the whole do. Well, I had expected the dessert to do pretty decently. The recipes I got off the net were obviously not be blamed for whatever the meal lacked. I, after all, did not have the experience to pull an entire meal off with complete success. It was a good first attempt though, if I do say so myself. The cauliflower manchurian was pretty good and so was the spinach (not very crispy by the time it was served I do admit!). Everyone was kind enough to praise all of it though.
At the end of the day, it was quite a high to be able to cook an entire meal and serve it to people outside of family. It does increase confidence levels and left me wanting to try more out. Of course my dad is right in saying that if I keep trying the same dishes I will get better at it. So here is hoping for another chance to try it all again.
In the meanwhile, there are so many more cuisines to try out when I get bored with the regular hum drum meals that I eat every day. I am thinking Russian next.... just a thought....
