Cooking with gas

There’s something I’ve been thinking about for some time and wanted to share with you. We’ve been getting such good response on our food and so many kind words for our chefs and we’re really pleased about that and thanks to all our customers for saying so.

But, as I say, that made me think about customers coming into our kitchen for cooking lessons. I know that at Café Spice Namaste Cyrus Todiwala does cooking lessons and they also offer cooking lessons at Chutney Mary and Andy Varma, the chef/owner of Vama, also offers cookery classes. So we’ve been talking about this at Babur.

We’d like people who come to our cooking class to be able to be as hands on as possible because you always learn and remember better by doing. So for preparing mise en place and cooking, people in the class will be guided by our chefs. From our other restaurant, Planet Spice, chef Raj Pandey has already done classes so he might lead the class but our Babur chefs, Jiwan and Pravin, will also be there and they can also guide customers through the learning.

The classes would have to be on a day when the kitchen isn’t so busy because our kitchen just isn’t big enough for extra people at busy times. We were thinking about Monday afternoons. Then, after the class was over and the food cooked, people in the class would sit down to eat what they had prepared. Any comments?

Also, we’ve been trying to come up with a name for our Babur takeaway. We’ve tried to think of an alternative to ‘takeaway’ and then thought that our customers might be able to help. So if you have any ideas about this, please post a comment or send us an email. We’ll give a dinner for two to the person who suggests a name we use.

And lastly, this week’s recipe for Tawa-Griddled Pomfret comes from another of our chefs, Sheik Unus. We want everyone to get a bit of the spotlight and hope you enjoy his recipe.



TAWA POMFRET
(Serves 4)



Ingredients:

4 small pomfret (about 150gm – 170gm)

For the marination:
2 Tbsps ginger garlic paste
juice of 2 lemons
salt to taste
2 tsp ajwain (carom) seeds
1 tsp red chilli powder
½ tsp turmeric powder
100ml mustard oil
1 tsp cumin powder, briefly roasted in a pan
1 tsp gram flour

Method:

Wash the fish in cold water, pat dry then make three deep incisions on each side of the fish.

Mix all the ingredients for marination in a bowl.

Apply this marination to the fish and leave it for 30 minutes.

Heat one deep frying pan put some mustard oil then add the fish one by one to the pan and carefully cook about three to four minutes per side.
Remove from pan and serve hot.