“Turn left!!” I tell my father from the back seat watching in horror as he turns right into the cross city tunnel taking us in the opposite direction that we want to. We are running late for our date with Chef Kumar the chef and owner of Aki’s and Abhi’s Indian restaurants. He is going to show my mother and I how to make a curry paste from scratch-or so we thought…

Escaping the tunnel and arriving at Aki’s breathless and panting we meet Kumar. “Cooking has to come from here (points to heart) and not here (points to his head)” says Kumar Mahadevan, chef and owner. Aki’s has just been given its first chef’s hat in the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide Awards and is the only hatted Indian restaurant in Australia while Abhi’s, well that remains a perennial Inner West favourite packed every night including Monday nights.

I must admit that I don’t often make Indian food at home as I want to stay away from using bottled pastes and sauces as much as possible and yet I don’t often have the recipes to make my spice pastes from scratch. I invited my mother along as she is a keen curry maker so I knew that she would be interested in this.

Which brings me to my next point “I don’t believe in spice pastes” Kumar says. I look around. Hmm okay, I have come for a lesson on how to make my own Indian spice pastes and he doesn’t believe in them? He explains further that most spice pastes are meant for convenience but at his two restaurants, each sauce is made from scratch using different flavour combinations. Unlike say French cuisine where there are five master sauces, Indian cuisine has a multitude of different sauces and even within a huge country such as India, people find themselves as strangers to the cuisine from another area.

South Indian cuisine tends to be  lighter, more watery and spicier whereas North Indian cuisine tends to be richer, creamier with more cream, butter and nut sauces. He explains the origin of the very popular butter chicken. It originated 60-70 years ago in Delhi where a chef had some leftover Tandoori chicken. He made a tomato, butter, cream and garlic sauce and that’s how we find ourselves with butter chicken. And check out this vat of butter chicken sauce being made. That’s a lot of butter (or buttah!). And Kumar tells us that the best results are achieved with a tandoor oven as that imparts a smokiness to the chicken that is hard to replicate at home.

A pot of butter chicken sauce-now that’s a lot of butter!

But now onto the recipes. Today we are making my favourite curry a palak paneer. How long will it take? Once the mise en place is prepared, just 15 minutes. Palak Paneer is a delicious and very healthy curry made up of a spinach puree with cubes of Indian cottage cheese.

The spice drawer

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I am pretty sure that the pharmacy near Mr NQN’s work knows me by now. I am the woman who rings up frantic at around 5pm and asks for 10 bottles of her favourite produce to be put aside to be picked up by her husband after work. One afternoon’s request was a little odd.

“Hello, could you please put aside a packet of fake nails and some denture glue for me? My husband will come and pick it up tonight.” I say breathlessly.

“Sure what brand of nails and denture glue would you like ma’am?” the polite man at the other end of the phone asks.

“Any kind! I don’t know!” I reply flummoxed at the question. I hesitate before answering “they’re umm… to make vampire fangs…”

“Ahh I see…” Well the pharmacist does work on Oxford Street so I’m sure people have done this before

I had been planning this True Blood dinner party for months. The timing was of course to coincide with the end of the current season of True Blood, a show that I had become wholly and completely besotted with. Mr NQN was outnumbered that evening by giggling ladies because of course the show has the best looking male cast on television i.e. a family assorted packet of man biscuits with a guy for every taste. Mr NQN of course still refers to it as “that zombie show” but I could not be deterred in my love for it. The idea for the dinner was inspired by season three’s dinner party which involved three courses of blood:

First course: “Chilled carbonated blood. Cruelty free, all willingly donated. Note the citrusy finish? This one ate only tangerines for weeks.”
Second course: “Carlo bring me that Thai boy.”
Third course: “Warm blood bisque infused with rose petals.”
Dessert: Blood Gelato

Of course the idea of serving up blood to my dear friends wasn’t going to happen. I mean they put up with a lot, the photo taking, the traipsing off to far flung restaurants in the name of a meal but serving blood to them might stretch the friendship so I decided to do a blood themed dinner party instead. Invited were my True Blood loving friends because of course we would be watching episodes of the show afterwards.

Although I do like kitsch I wanted it to be an elegant dinner party because of course vampires have a lot of money as they can glamour people into giving them their worldly goods. We used some stunning Waterford crystal in blood red and a John Rocha black cut centrepiece filled with red fruit and vegetables to carry through the bloody red theme. Just because I thought that Bill as the King of Louisiana might have these in his house.

So there were nibblies in the form of caviar topped blinis, a bloody red spicy tomato soup, a symbolic oxtail and beetroot pie with an equally symbolic black savourine salad. Plus dessert of course, in fact two, with a pre dessert of raspberry sorbet and a molten blood chocolate cake served with raspberry ripple ice cream.

I did have a bit of a True Blood encounter myself, not so much of the vampiric kind but of the Jason Stackhouse kind. Ryan Kwanten is in Sydney shooting his latest film “Not Suitable For Children” written by Australian writer Michael Lucas and one day I found myself within breathing and touching distance of him. I did breathe but I did not touch him (although I wanted to, not in an inappropriate way, well kind of…). Of course I wanted to invite him to this party but I refrained from embarrassing myself and getting a certain rejection and instead chose to admire his divineness from where I was standing. And I was a little too scattered and excited to ask for a photo (silly me!).

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