Disaster in the Kitchen

Why is it that some of life’s lessons can only be learned the hard way?

No matter how many times I’ve heard the advice “don’t try to serve something you’ve never made before to important guests,” it really takes a disaster to let that message sink in. Stupid malai kofta.

To inaugurate my new London flat, I decided to have a few friends over for dinner yesterday evening. After several calls and several people undecided, I opted for an Indian dinner that would be flexible on how many it could serve. I had paneer (a simple, plain, white Indian cheese used in most of their vegetarian dishes), so I decided on palak (spinach) paneer as one dish. I had potatoes, so malai (cream) kofta (potatoes) seemed an obvious choice too. I even had a tikka masala (a red tomato curry) sauce in my fridge ready to go for a spicy chicken tikka masala. Then, all that was left was a nice biriyani rice (think pilaf) and some naan to round out the meal. Well, and a vegan chocolate/orange cake for dessert of course.

Simple enough, right?

I started with the vegan chocolate cake, and for the first time in a while it came out really well, but that’s what you get with a real oven instead of trying to improvise with a toaster oven. And the palak paneer even came out alright (although I had a terrifying moment when I dumped more than a tablespoon of cumin seeds in the pan by accident at the outset), and the chicken tikka masala was a cinch thanks to the pre-made sauce. My water to rice ratio wasn’t quite right for the biriyani, and it came out a bit mushy, but certainly still edible.

And then came the malai kofta. The dish sounded complex, but still doable. Basically, the recipe is: boil some potatoes, mash them, make them into little balls, stuff something in the center (I chose dried cranberries and cashews for a spin on Kashmiri malai kofta which calls for raisins), deep fry them, and cover them in a creamy sauce.

I made my preparations meticulously. While the potatoes were boiling away, I finely chopped my onion, counted out five black pepper corns, two kernels of green cardamom, two cloves, made a cashew powder and prepared cashews and cranberries for stuffing. After a quick skin and a mash, I started forming the mix into balls and stuffing them with cranberries and cashews.

Just as I had finished that step, guests started arriving; in the end, we were seven in all.

My problem came with the next step: deep frying. Now, I don’t think I’ve ever in my entire life seen my mom deep fry anything. It just wasn’t and isn’t something done in my household, ever. And with the exception of the South where fried pickles seem to be the norm, most American households are probably in a similar situation. Deep frying is the ugly duckling of cooking methods in the US. It is shunned to the nth degree. When talking about it, one practically must turn three times, throw salt over the shoulder, say ten Hail Maries and spit twice just to cleanse the soul. Fair or not, deep frying is perceived as bad as eating a clod of butter.

In China, however, it’s just considered another way to cook things, and so I saw it done on several occasions while I was there. I even tried it by myself a couple of times, both in China and before when I was cooking at Casablanca (the house I lived in my senior year at Whitman), but I had never been super-josu (skilled) at it.

Well, just as all my guests were arriving, I made a fatal mistake: I took all of my carefully prepared potato balls, and I put them all in the gurgling oil at the same time. Instead of turning into golden brown, crispy delicacies, they just disintegrated, turning into a greasy potato, cashew, and cranberry mush. :o( By adding too many at the same time, the oil cooled down too much to be able to fry effectively, and as it was heating back up, the potato balls just mushed into each other. The result was that I was out a dish, and a vegetarian dish at that (which was important as almost half the people coming were of the vegetarian ilk).

Frustrated, I turned to the naan. I have made naan before, and I have made chappati (an even flatter bread than naan) before, but not this particular recipe which came from a cooking class I took with my friend Chesa in Udaipur. I added the flour and an egg, then some water. The recipe called for three cups…by which it must have meant little tiny Indian cups, because I added two, thinking it was more than enough and my batter was still runny. I added flour, and added flour, and added flour until it started to become malleable but then I realized that I didn’t even have a rolling pin and I just gave up.

What a disappointment it all was! It is nearly impossible to have every exploit in the kitchen work out perfectly, and I know I’ve had my share of complete screw ups—the sheer mention of the words “lentil loaf” to any of the former Casa crew will most certainly elicit a round of uproarious laughter. But that was basically in front of family, not at a special event with new friends.

I guess all that I can say at this point is lesson learned. On Saturday both of my new flatmates officially move in and I think they’re expecting me to cook dinner for them (I told them I enjoy cooking and they latched onto that right away). I think spaghetti sounds like a good plan.