Everyone Cooked!

Gathered for a potluck dinner at our hosts' new home. We see one another often. Pretty awesome for everyone to be cooking. Not a competition. All familiar easy foods to go into the tummies. Plenty of food! Everyone cooked and baked. The rest brought loads of beer!

The hosts cooked up a storm too- chicken curry (with no coconut milk and very little oil) and spicy beef stew. Very good! Except nobody brought bread. Couldn't mop the gravy. Gaah. Kale salad, mac n cheese, and very randomly, stir-fried broccoli. Hahaha. All good. Desserts were impossible to photograph. I was elbowed out of the way by deranged sugar fiends. Managed to grab a photo of the delicious earl grey bundt, but totally didn't get any good photos of the tangy apple crumble and irresistible double-chocolate fudge cookies. Those cookies disappeared damn fast man. 

Our contribution was goat biryani. Well, sort of. The man wanted to have goat. Couldn't be totally certain we got it right. Our cooking utensils and pots are not quite what dum biryani is usually done in. But we made do. Googled a few recipes to see what we wanted to draw on. Marinated the cubes of goat overnight, then wok-cooked them for a bit. Separately toasted the cashew nuts, raisins, and caramelized onions and shallots.

Went light on the ghee. Cooked the rice on the stove, let it cool off a little. Then we started layering the meat with the cashew nuts, raisins and onions. Once done, we put the pot into the oven for about 25 minutes to finish. We could only depend on the smell to gauge the 'rightness' of the biryani. Or rather I judged it on the smell. Going by how little was left, it seemed pretty okay. Success, I think.