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| Despite the fact that there are no people in this picture, please know that I didn't just have a "partay" alone with my cream cheese. I had a friend over, I promise. |
Now, I will freely admit that I thought I didn't need Philadelphia Cream Cheese. In fact, I hadn't even thought of Philly CC for the past 6 weeks, what with all the teaching and living and Indian eating that I was doing. It was only last weekend, when I was cooking at a friend's house, that I realized my devotion to this spreadable cheese.
I was invited to a friend's house to make some dinner. We decided to do something pretty simple, but, as it happens in India, something simple turns into a full afternoon of realizing we didn't have the proper utensils, the appropriate vessels for our food, and feverishly googling recipes to try and throw something together. My friend calls it "gorilla cooking". It went marvelously in the end; I was the primary orchestrater of a 6-person meal consisting of chicken chili (with tomatoes boiled and skinned from scratch), a brownie/lava cake dessert with feta cheese on top (sounds weird, but I'll explain it later), and chai.
So this brownie/lava cake. Earlier in the afternoon, my friend and I were planning on making a cucumber salad with feta crumbled on top. Sounds delicious. We eagerly opened the feta packaging to find, not crumbly, salty, tangy cheese from the Mediterranean, but a soft, spreadable, intensely salty cheese without clear origin. Confused, we read the label and it did indeed proclaim that this cheese was feta. We knew better, however, and set about devising a new plan for it. We couldn't just spread the cheese on top of something; my friend's children are notoriously finicky eaters and would spit it out as soon as look at it. We had to somehow combine it with something. But what?
Thinking of her last grocery delivery, my friend realized that she had a large bag of chocolate chips and some baking supplies. We could put the salty cheese in a brownie! It would be like a super fancy dessert that combines chocolate and salt in a really sophisticated way, and couldn't possibly go wrong. We ran over to her laptop and googled from-scratch brownie recipes. Alas, they all seemed to require cocoa. Finally, we found one that used chocolate chips! It was perfect. We raced back to the kitchen to see what we could do.
At that point, one of my friend's children was waking up from a nap and needed her full attention. Shortly after that, two neighbors came by to join us for dinner. Overwhelmed with hosting and childcare, I was left to my own devices in the kitchen. Using only 3 pots and a dwindling supply of utensils, I mixed the chili, whipped up the brownie batter, poured it into a round cake pan, spooned the cheese into the batter, and used a knife to create swirls of salty goodness in the oh-so-chocolately batter. I popped it in the oven (right after taking out the toasted bread to go with the chilli), and waited.
Dinner was a success! A dinner for six, prepared and delivered with (relative) panache. I found I was totally exhilarated with my ability to create delicious things from such difficult conditions, and my cooking confidence has gone through the roof. After dinner, I made up my first unaided batch of chai, and it wasn't terrible!
That was a couple weekends ago. Just this last weekend, I made eggplant parmesan and green bean pasta with two friends, and then made mushroom risotto and gluten free brownies at someone else's house the next day! It was a beautiful 24 hours of good food, good friends, and much wine. I've had a wonderful time in the kitchens of Mussoorie, and I know that, if I can do it here, I can do it anywhere.
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