I haven’t always been adventurous when it comes to food. Until I met Thaddeus and now I live to eat.

Do you Eat To Live or Live To Eat?

Thaddeus will tell you that when we met, I was subsisting on a diet of minute rice (with cheese) or peanut butter. That’s not completely accurate, but it’s not too far off either. Largely due to his influence, I now regularly eat a broad array of food and enjoy experimenting.

Recently, Thaddeus sister got me a class at a local cooking school/catering facility called Conquering Cuisine. I signed up for a class about cooking Indian food. We ended up making vegetable samosas, a really tasty salad and chicken tikka masala. I took a friend of mine who enjoys cooking. Her husband is a vegetarian, so it looked like it would be a useful class since many Indian dishes are vegetarian.

Despite the photo, the main entree was delicious. I took home the recipe for it, but honestly, I doubt I’ll ever make it. And if I did, I’d change a lot of things about it. First of all, I did NOT cook the watery mess they called rice. They also provided all the ingredients. I would have gone with chicken thighs instead of breast meat. I would also have made mine creamier and spicier than their ingredients allowed for.

There were 13 other couples learning to cook that night with us, so they had to really aim at the lowest common denominator in terms of cooking skills and palates. So it’s not likely I’ll do this again.

I learned a few things. There’s an ingredient I had never heard of called Amchur powder (ground, dried mango). I purchased some after the class and used it in a korma dish I made at home and it added a lot. The class also taught me to use more whole cream in my Indian dishes. I will definitely use the salad dressing we made, and I may even try my hand at samosas at home.

I will also offer blog readers my best tip on making Indian food. For any dish you make that uses cumin and cardamom, I highly suggest adding dried (or fresh if you can find it) Kasoori methi (fenugreek leaf). It adds a very distinctive rich, caramel-like curry flavor that I love. It also has a habit of making you smell a little bit like an old Indian auntie after you’ve eaten it. I think that’s a good thing.

Current Knitting

While I have made progress on the Hitchhiker, I also had a bit of project-ADHD. First the Hitchhiker.

I’m at the point where each row is about 170 sts and there are 8 rows in each saw-tooth repeat. I ended up getting distracted and decided to crank out a pair of socks as a gift for Thaddeus’ accupuncturist.

He wore a similar pair to his last session and she love them. I had a similar yarn, so I made this pair. Just need to graft the toe and weave in ends on the second sock.