Cookin' Indian

Took a cooking class on Indian food Saturday evening at the Viking Store on Brentwood. On the menu was food from the appetisers to the main course.
It started out a little awkward as started making the Samosas (curry vegetable pastries). The feeling mostly came from an unfamiliarity. Luckily, that soon passed and the evening became fun. We had three people on our team, Martha and I, and Susan. Splitting up the tasks of cutting, grinding, dicing, grating and stirring was easy.
The samosas look kind of like pot-stickers, but are deep fried. After cooking the stuffing, we made our own dough, patted it out into small sections and wrapped the stuffing.
We then made Dhal (split pea curry). This one was easy to make.
We also made basmati rice, this mostly consisted of soaking the rice for 30 minutes then cooking it (wow ;)
Finally, we made chicken with roasted coriander in a coconut curry sauce (Dakshini Murgh). This had a new trick for me that we roasted the seasonings in a dry pan until they browned a bit.
There was a twenty five minute break after getting the chicken simmering when we got to look through the store. Funny, on the tv, live, was Emeril cooking an indian dish, browning his seasonings.
At last, we all sat down and had the full dinner. I thought every thing tasted good. The overall experience was fun. I did learn some things, and it did not end up like an info-mercial on all the great Viking products.
Overall, if you have already made (successfully) some indian dishes, I probably would not recommend it, unless you were going as a group to have some fun. It is nice though to test drive the utensils and things before you buy.