Monday, March 30, 2009

Cooking Club

I did a bit of a crazy thing last night, and it stems from answering an ad on craigslist. Don't worry, it's not casual encounters or anything. While perusing the site, I happened upon a call for the formation of a cooking club and I responded to the ad which is totally out of character for me. The good news is that the organizers replied back and asked me to attend. The better news is that I actually showed up, I often flake when I have to drive more than 10 minutes to do something.

I'm so glad I went. All the girls that attended were really nice and welcoming; I was the only person that didn't have a tie to the host. And, for the first meeting, I thought it went extremely well. There were some missed ingredients and some substituted ingredients (but hell, that's hard to avoid when you have 6 different people bringing stuff for a foreign dish that no one's ever cooked.)

The theme for the evening was Thai food. We did Tom Yum, Pad Thai, and caramel dumplings.

We paired up to make these dishes which was fun and worked pretty well. My partner and I did the Tom Yum. Here is the link to the recipe we used from recipezaar. Our recipe had a few subtle differences but I believe they originated from the same source. The only thing I would change is the amount of green peppers. We were directed to cook them in the soup and it was really hot, like lips numb hot. The recipe suggests 2-3 chilis and unless you like super spicy things, I would say 1 is more than enough. 1/2 a pepper for mild, 1 for medium, 2 for hot, and 3 for crazy hot. We also didn't use rice noodles, but we had Pad Thai as an entree and that would have been overkill.
I don't know the exact recipe we used for Pad Thai, but I'll post it when I can, because it was great.
For dessert we had caramel dumplings. That one was a bit of a trial because carmelization can be trouble, but the girls were able to execute it perfectly after a lot of hard work.
I also don't have the recipe for the dumplings, but I'll post it later.
Next month we're going to try sushi, stay tuned.

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