Rewind to Indian Cooking, Fast foward to next week, oops, rewind to the present, then pause...

I just got back from my sister's wedding in SC. I flew out on a red eye, which was a huge mistake because I didn't sleep at all on the plane and was coughing and run down the whole time. My body is still trying to figure out if it wants to get sick or not, so I'll just drift around today like a zombie.

I, Bethany, hereby promise never to take a red eye without ambien. It may be the stuff of the devil, but it is better than feeling horrible for days on end because because of no sleep for 2 days.

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I have about a kajillion pics to download off my camera and sort through before I can post the teensy amount of food pics I took in SC. So I will post about some fantastic Indian cooking.

I bid for and won a cooking class at a NARN auction. My friends, Suzanne and Anthony, very graciously let us have the class at their home.

Here's Nitin, the super chef and our instructor, chopping away. He gets major points for being nice to me while I pestered him.
Here is the base of the curry bubbling in the pot. It was a game of sitting and waiting for the oil to make its way to the top after each addition of an ingredient. This bit of info is what I was missing in my curry making. Here is the final curry before the potatoes were added. My plate before I devoured it. All of the pot tending was worth it. I'm pretty confident, thanks to Nitin's excellent teaching, that I can make this on my own. Thanks, Nitin!!! I see this curry base becoming Mattar Tofu in my near future...

For dessert after the delicious Indian food, we had this very lumpy and lopsided cake that I made for Suzanne's bday, which was the day after the cooking class. What can I say, I need to practice at making layered cakes. I've been hanging out in sheet cake (that stays in the glass pan) and cupcake slacker land for a while now. Long gone are the days of the layer cakes with shocking blue frosting with little frosting cats prancing around on the top.

In the cake below, each layer is 1 batch of the toasted coconut cupcakes from VCTOTW. I was a bit nervous on how it would taste because of the lumpy dryness of it, but it was good. FYI - if you're going to use whole coconut milk while baking, water it down because that is what the recipe is expecting. otherwise, you'll get a lumpy looking dryish cake :) ~~~~~

I also made Suzanne some Nusseken, which I gave her on Sunday, the day after her bday. I got the recipe from Mihl. I used pecans instead of almonds (because I didn't have any). They reminded me of really tasty mini pecan pies. Everybody agreed either through verbal praise or by eating lots of them. Many thanks to Mihl for sharing this recipe.

I only remembered to take a pic just before the last 1/2 piece was eaten. I promise that I dipped both sides.

(side note: I only used 1/2 cup + 2 tbs of margarine in the topping instead of 1 cup + 2 tbs)

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Here are some pics of The Judge and Sable playing.

Almost off the ledge.
Boo hoo hoo! quit head butting me!
Are you ignoring me? One big head butt that starts at the neck...
and works its way down Sable's leg...
Until The Judge's head is on the floor and Sable is using him for a head rest. Oh, the life of a dog.