ICE offers one of the country’s largest recreational cooking programs. With over 1,500 cooking classes and over 22,000 students each year, there is something for every cook looking to learn new techniques in the kitchen. This month, Shiv of the blog Pithy and Cleaver braved a torrential downpour to try a class on Essentials of Indian Cooking. Luckily, the dishes she made and the skills she learned helped compensate for the bad weather.
It was a dark and stormy evening.
No, really. It was. Seriously. And it’s important for you to understand just HOW dark and stormy it was in order to get some context here. It was day two of what has now been revealed to have been a record-breaking rainstorm here in NYC, the kind of rain that destroys subway lines, makes umbrellas cower in fear, and makes one Shiv distinctly disinclined to leave her bed. It was the kind of afternoon that makes a girl think very seriously about blowing off any obligations to the outside world, even if those obligations include something she really, really, REALLY wants to do. Such as take a class in Indian cooking.
Indian cookery is something I’d wanted to try my hand at for some time; an exotic fascination that I had, quite frankly, been too chicken to try without supervision. I kept hearing horror stories about how complicated and slow it was, how you had to have at least an entire day and an Indian grandmother of your very own in order to do it right. I knew that if I was going to try it at all, it was going to have to be under the tutelage of a skilled professional. Which is why I did, eventually, manage to drag my sorry self out of bed on this most horrid of days, brave the F train and show up at class. Also lose my umbrella, but that is a story for another time. More…