The University of Idaho Argonaut

Jaya Natarajan, right, from Mumbai, India, talks with Eileen Whipple about a recipe at the Indian Home Cooking class at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Saturday. The class was part of the "What's Cooking?" series. Jake Barber/Argonaut

A table covered in a pink tablecloth and five gingham-covered tables provided the backdrop for Moscow’s own version of a cooking show.
Twenty-one people gathered around the tables in the basement of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Palouse Saturday to enjoy the second installment in the Moscow Food Co-op’s “What’s Cookin’!” series: Indian Home Cooking.

Jaya Natarajan, a native of Mumbai, India (once called Bombay) shared recipes from many different regions of her country.
Natarajan saw an ad in the Moscow Food Co-op’s newsletter and decided to volunteer her services as a demonstration chef.
She said she did it “just to make Indian cooking accessible to the layman and not let them be intimidated by all those big names.”

Natarajan flitted around the small portable burners and answered questions class participants tossed her way about spices and ingredients and where to find them. She showed the class proper consistency and passed around spice jars for sniff tests. At one point, she turned the bottom of a bowl into an impromptu cutting board to demonstrate the proper way to slice chilies.
“For this class, I went with three basic principles,” Natarajan said. “One: health, two: ease in cooking and three: tasty.”

Her two assistants ferried dishes and ingredients back and forth from the adjoining kitchen, where some of the dishes’ components were prepared in advance. One of those assistants was Jennifer Whitney, the cooking class coordinator for the Moscow Food Co-op program.
“I could tell that (Natarajan) was really excited to share her knowledge and share her cuisine,” Whitney said.
The “What’s Cooking?” program is now in its fourth season and the 20-person classes have been selling out, according to Whitney. Four classes are offered per semester in April and October.

“Once we hit on the idea of ethnic classes, everything exploded,” Whitney said.
Previous classes have featured Korean, Thai, Polish, Ecuadorian and Mexican cooking.
Participants in the class were served mango milkshakes and were then shown how to make pakora (vegetable fritters), chole (a chickpea dish), vegetable pulao and badaam burfi (almond cookies.)

“That was great, the tasting,” said class participant Holly Shute. “Very informative. It was fun.”
The next class with available spaces is Japanese Home Cooking on Oct. 29. Tickets can be purchased at the Moscow Food Co-op for $21. Another course highlighting Indian food is already being planned for the April series.