Repas Indien

I’m taking a class this semester called An Appetite for Paris: Gender, Globalization, Travel, and Food. One of our assignments for the semester is to volunteer at the slow food café in the Bastille.

 

The cafe is home to the locals of the quartier, the meals are prepared by volunteers, and dinner is served at 20h.

 

This past Saturday I arrived at the cafe at 11:00am, donned my apron and wooden spoon, and spent the day working in the kitchen with my professor and several of my classmates. We made a repas Indien, all from scratch of course. This is a slow food cafe after all!

 

We started by making the ghee,

 

and chopped lots of veggies while the ghee did it’s thang on the stove. And yes, that is a technical term.

All the veggies were for various dishes we were making…

First up, the dal. The moong dal had been soaking already when we got there and proved to be quite the task when we started cooking. Ever tried making dal for 60 hungry Parisians? Neither had we! But, we made it work…

I had never actually made “authentic” dal before. It’s such a simple dish and it was really cool to watch the whole process. While the lentils boiled, we made the flavah. Yep, another technical term. Actually, I forget what this is actually called (anyone!?) but you fry the spices, onions and garlic in ghee and add it to the cooked dal. Oh. And it smells delicious. 

 

After you mix in the spices, you add fresh coriander and fresh lemon juice. And there you have it…dal for 60.

We also made a poulet curry, which is the brilliant brain child of my professor. It was actually kind of ironic to be cooking curry since lately we had just been discussing authenticity of certain foods in class earlier this week. Curry powder doesn’t even exist in “authentic” Indian cooking. Curry means vegetables and curry powder is a spin on the blend of spices (masalas) that goes into vegetable dishes in Indian cooking. It’s a sort of “Westernized” ingredient but is widely associated with traditional Indian cooking.

 

All that to say, this curry was curry powder-less. It did however have tamarind, sweet potato, chicken, onion and fresh coriander to name a few ingredients. (I’m working on getting recipes!)

 

We also made raita, one of my very favorites…

 

The highlight of the meal, however, was dessert (isn’t it always!?). We made halva, a really simple dessert of toasted semolina/sooji cooked with cardamom, cloves, cinnamon and cashews that have been fried in ghee. Then you stir in more more ghee on top of that. How could it not be good!?

  

Food coma.

It felt so great to spend the day in the kitchen, all 9 hours of it. I got quite a few stares on the way home from the café, and my hands still smell like garlic and onions after 24 hours, two showers, and countless hand washings.

 

But this was my kind of fun. Does that make sense? I learned about cooking a new cuisine, and spent the day talking and learning from those I shared the experience with. I’m a foodie by nature, so these little moments spent in the kitchen are special to me. Silly? Yes. But it’s amazing how food can bring people together.

 

The regulars filled up the cafe after we finished preparing the meal, open to whatever the volunteers had prepared, as I left with new friends, a new outlook, and a big steaming bowl of dal and curry.

 

Life is…yummy.

Tagged as: cooking, indian food, Paris