The Inaugural Meeting of The Cooking Club

Yesterday was the first ever cooking club event that Jake and Heather, and I have started. It was a lot of fun. The theme for the day was curries and so I did Japanese curry served with breaded chicken breast strips. Heather did a chick pea curry and another red curry that was Indian inspired.

Everything turned out very well and a lot of people showed up for the cook-off. Since it went so well, we are going to do monthly meets, each with a different theme. April is going to be a Texas BBQ theme and May is going to be an "Anything Grilled" theme since Summer will be starting up around then and people will be warming up their barbecue grills.

My Japanese curry seemed to be well received and thanks to the way the Japanese serve it, it was also good for the couple of vegetarians in the group. My Japanese rice cooker also got some recognition which I thought was kind of funny. Heather's two dishes were very good and the mango lasses that she made to go along with them were excellent. It was fun to see how other people make dishes that I like to eat. The other cool part about this club is that I get to meet new people and most of the ones that came to yesterday's cooking were pretty cool. It is always good to expand your people pool.

In other news, I am going over to Ben's parents' place for dinner tonight and am looking forward to that. Ben's mom is a kick-ass cook. I also got a new client at work which means more hours and money. He is a nice guy and I don't think it will be much of a chore to help him out. We are almost the same age and like some of the same stuff so that helps. He is an awesome artist and I am hoping to trade him some of my photos for a piece of his artwork. There is one piece of his in particular that I like and I think it would look sweet in a frame so after I get to know him a bit better, I may try to make a deal with him.

Other than that, not a ton is going on. The crappy part about moving back is it seemed like every weekend I could do something new and exciting in Japan without much effort; here, it is a bit more work to find something unique and cool to do. Anywho, I am getting ready to format my computer and the files I have been copying over to one of my drives look like they are almost done so it is time I close this up and get ready to format the drive.