The subject? Indian cuisine. The students? Some 40 Japanese women and 2 men - all members of the Hiroshima International Cooking Club... plus an Indian teenager who happened to be on a student exchange and was dragged into the kitchen.
How Kumar got to be Sensei is a long story: someone who knows someone who knows that Kumar is into cooking mentioned it to a Cooking Club member, and a few phone calls (plus a meeting to set the menu) later the recipes had been distributed to the students, the ingredients prepared, and Kumar Sensei (and his photographer/wife) showed up at the professional kitchen ready for the show.
The menu consisted of an appetizer (chola tikki), an entree (a shrimp curry with a coconut milk base) and a dessert.... And here's where things got sticky: Kumar had never made a dessert before - let alone from scratch! He decided he would make gulab jamun, an Indian staple... and not exactly an easy recipe - but he only found that out later.
With the recipes out and two weeks to rehearse his dessert, Kumar started raiding the web searching for help. He finally ran into Manjula - this Indian lady who has a website with every recipe you can imagine, and not only shows recipes but also videos demonstrating the whole preparation. He watched and watched and watched again, and finally announced that he was ready to proceed into the kitchen.
He asked our cook (a lady who cooks for us twice a week) to buy him the ingredients... flour, sugar, baking soda, butter.... (You may wonder why he couldn't do the shopping himself - and that's because reading labels in Japanese is a privilege that we don't have. Butter could be margarine, sugar could be salt, flour could be rat poison... and we would never know!)
But back to my story: the ingredients were on the kitchen counter on the Tuesday before the cooking lesson and then some disaster happened at work. Kumar worked long hours on Tuesday and Wednesday. And when he finally managed to get to the kitchen it was just 48 hours before "C-day". Visibly stressed and running between the computer and the stove he made a batch of gulab jamun. It looked good, but we could not try it yet. After preparing the mix and frying the balls, they need to soak in syrup for 20 minutes. We both stood by the soaking gulab jamuns in expectation until the clock marked nearly midnight. Then we took the first spoonful... and - oh oh, something was wrong. What should have been soft and fluffy felt like a rock on our tongues. And Kumar had one more evening and half a Saturday to retry...
Being an engineer by training, Kumar applied all his skills to investigating the root cause. Inspection of Manjula's website proved that he had done everything correctly. So the problem should reside in the ingredients. Flour... check. Butter... check. Sugar... check. Baking soda... Are you sure this is baking soda? The suspicious white powder might as well have been rat poison. Friday morning comes. Summon Kumar's admin. Ask her to call the cook. Cook confirms that the powder was right.
"Baking soda?"
"Yes."
"Positive?"
"Yes, baking powder."
"No, not baking powder, baking soda."
"They're the same thing."
"No they're not."
"They aren't?"
A-ha! Root cause found. Admin runs to the market and buys the right white powder. Kumar puts it in his briefcase. Then disaster strikes again and Kumar stays late in the office on Friday.
Saturday morning comes. I'm still in deep sleep when noise from the kitchen startles me out of a sweet dream. Kumar has about 8 hours to master the gulab jamuns and he's wasting no time. Fast-forward through the process of running from the stove to the computer a hundred times. An hour and a half later we are both staring at the soaking gulab jamuns. The timer goes off and we run for the spoon. We cut a piece and barely breathing put it in our mouths... And it's just right. Soft, tender, fluffy, smoothly warm and sweet and delicious. Kumar naps for a couple of hours and then goes, triumphantly, to teach the 40 Japanese ladies and 2 men the long-treasured family recipe (well, it's gotta be Manjula's family recipe anyway).
The lesson was a major success - gulab jamun included. About 10 days later a postcard showed up in the mail - a tribute from one of his students that made every pre-class pain and stress absolutely worth it.
Now we're both thinking about the proper way to thank Manjula...
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