A few weekends ago I took a cooking class on making French chocolates from a French chef, Suzanne (Cuisine By Suzanne). We found out about this class when we we were at a Japanese festival in Seattle and that it was being offered at a Japanese chef’s house (Hiroko Sugiyama). I jumped at the chance to learn something new as I like taking cooking classes, no matter what cuisine. I especially like taking classes that are hands on. It is no fun just watching the chef show how to make something if you cannot participate. Not only is a hands-on class more fun but you learn much more by doing it yourself. I usually try to apply that to my cooking as it triggers new ideas. Over the years I have taken lots of classes – 5-day class for the basics of cooking, Pizza making, Chocolate and so on.

We made a variety of chocolates – Hazelnut Orange Toffee, Vanilla and Chocolate Macaroons, Canneles Bordelais, Rasberry Truffle and Rosemary and Olives Cracker. I love macaroons but the French macaroons are different. They look like little mini burgers – white chocolate buns with dark chocolate sandwiched between them. They were amazing! I had a filling of chocolates that day along with some excellent white wine (chardonnay) and the rosemary olive crackers.

The rosemary olive crackers were excellent and gave me some ideas of how to make crackers with Indian spices. My mom used to make various kinds of crackers and I decided to apply the technique I learnt in this class. When all was said and done, my experiment failed. The crackers came out dry since I had completely forgotten to put an essential ingredient – oil! My plan was to add the cracker recipe to the blog but that did not pan out. Anyway, I will posting that soon in the near future. So I had to think of something else. I saw that I had potatoes, cauliflower, red onions. That’s when I decided to make the Aloo Gobi recipe.

Not sure if you have seen the movie, Bend it like Beckham. It shows a Indian girls quest to make it big in soccer in spite of her parents wish for her to become a doctor or an engineer. Anyway, they have Aloo Gobi in the movie. At the end of the movie is a video of the director showing how to make Aloo Gobi with the director’s mom guiding her.

Aloo Gobi (literal translation – Potato Cauliflower) is one of my favorite ways to eat potato and cauliflower. Even though the name of the dish is very unassuming, it is a really tasty dish and very easy to make. It goes really well with Naan or Roti (or Chappati).