Recently I have signed on for a 10 week Indian cookery class at NRC so when I saw that there would be an Indian cookeryclass/demonstration as part of India week in Belfast I quickly signed up. We arrived at the BMC Titanic quarter campus and were shown upstairs to the viewing gallery. So no actual cooking for me. Ah well, I guess I’ll just watch. We sit upstairs and look down on the kitchen. This I being held in the catering section of the BMC so this is a fully fitted with 12 stations for cooking. They also have cameras on the prep area that we can see on the 2 screens up on the wall. We are sitting in a raised seating area with a gap in the wall at the front that if you look through is overlooking the cooking area. This is pretty important at these things, as I’ve been to poorly designed cooking demos before where it’s hard to see what the cooks are doing and it ruins the whole event. As we begin the 2 screens up on the wall (that we’re due to watch the demo on) blink and turn off. Oh dear. So we are invited to come to the front to view, it’s actually a better option and we can see the class perfectly.
The screens came on about 5 mins later for the people who opted to stay sitting. Our instructor Nisha begins and takes us through 2 recipes Sizzling Chicken and Vegetable Pulao Rice, giving us some history of Indian cooking and info on differences between styles in various parts of India. We get advice on stocking up on herbs and spices, and the utensils needed for cooking. After the demo the “cooks” are invited to begin cooking. During this time we were asking questions and getting advice from the instructor. She also took us through the 3rd dish that the cooks wouldn’t be cooking dry potato curry.
We watched this for about 45 mins before deciding to leave. You see we hadn’t had any dinner and at that point I was half 7 and we just couldn’t take it anymore. So we headed home and got a Chinese for dinner…nah I’m only joking, of course we got an Indian take away. It was a great taster course and now I can’t wait for September to get started with some actual cooking!
