Gourmet's Circle

The Gourmet’s Circle

Everyone likes eating good food. It’s an unavoidable fact of life like income tax or corruption!

Unfortunately, like most other unavoidable facts of life, eating really good food at good restaurants comes at a price!

In case I haven’t made it clear in my earlier post, I REALLY like good steak.

The cost of a top-class steak can range anywhere between Rs 600 to Rs 2,500 depending on whether you go to The Zodiac Grill or Blue Frog. Honorable mentions should go to Yellow Tree Café and Hard Rock Café which have decent steaks for around Rs 400.

Eating well however doesn’t have to be so expensive. All you need is a bit of innovation, a bit of creation, a love for cooking and a really good appetite! You also need really good friends, which brings us to the subject of “The Gourmet’s Circle.” Some of my closest friends who share a love for good food coupled with a horror for paying exorbitant rates in restaurant’s (unless accompanied by parents) meet up every month with the sole aim of drinking cheap wine, munching on homemade dip and wafers and cooking a decent meal of steak and mashed potato.

We take turns to act as host, (quite easy, host brings food everyone else brings dessert, wine, wafers etc.) and then we all cook. It’s awesome fun; three people, a whole lot of steak and tons of the most delicious garlicy, buttery, cheesy (and occasionally vodkaey) mashed potato, some garlic bread and a LOT of wine.

The steak can be bought from various places in the city; they all have really good beef.

1. Sante’s – Pali Naka, Bandra(really expensive but delicious)
2. Nature’s basket – Hill Road, Bandra (rib-eye costs Rs 600/KG and its awesome)
3. Farm Products – Colaba (reasonable and very good)

To complete our perfect evening the last time we met, we played loud music, drank a lot of wine (repeating myself am I) and ate a lovely cake prepared by one of our number (whose cakes look almost as good as she does, don’t know how she tastes but the cake was WOW!) I got the ice cream and all in all we had an AWESOME time.

The second meeting of The Gourmet’s Circle is this Friday, I will update the blog with the culinary delights we had soon after.

Tip of the Day

Today’s tip: The recipe for my Matheran Mashed potatoes.
We made this in my house in Matheran (a small hill station outside Bombay) using everything we could find, and it turned out to be really good. We had a version of it at our Gourmet’s Circle and it was much appreciated (well you can’t go wrong with so much butter and cream can you?)


Matheran Mashed Potatoes

Ingredients

8 Potatoes

4 Cloves of Garlic

1/2 Kg of Butter

4 Slices of Cheese

5 tablespoons of Vodka

4 Cups of Milk

1 Cup of Cream


Method

• Peel, boil and mash the potatoes

• Crush garlic till it forms a paste

• Add milk

• Add Butter

• Add Garlic

• Add Cream

• Put the mixture on the boil and add the cheese when it’s hot, keep stirring until the cheese melts

• Add Vodka

• Add salt to taste

• Wait till the potatoes have cooked and serve hot.

Viola! Instant cholesterol!