Bollywood Night

We have a tradition of "Bollywood nights" among our group of singles, or at least, the beginnings of a tradition, considering this year is the third year we've had such an event.  It's fabulous.  We cook, we talk, we watch a three hour Bollywood film with subtitles, we eat more at the intermission...in short, we have a grand time.

This year we watched a really sweet story called Rab ne bana di Jodi, which means "a match made in heaven."  It's a romantic musical in Hindi, so 81% of our group needed subtitles to understand the film :)

It's a great story.  The male lead Surinder falls in love with Taani.  Through a series of events, they end up getting married to fulfill her father's dying wishes.  He loves her, she wants to be a good wife but doesn't love him.  She hears about a dance competition in town and asks if she can take the lessons offered.  Surinder only wants her to be happy, so he agrees.  However, he wants to make her fall in love with him.  He completely changes his personality and appearance and meets her at the dance lessons, identifying himself as Raj.  Taani doesn't recognize him and they are assigned to be dance partners for the rest of the lessons.  Surinder continues to change his appearance back to Surinder each evening when he goes home, and to become Raj for the dance lessons.  Surinder starts to realize that Taani might fall in love with him, but then he realizes, she will be in love with Raj, not knowing he is also Surinder.  In a way, he begins to compete with himself for her love.  It was really a good choice for the evening.

As always, we also made plenty of food.  The few of us who were cooking panicked a little, wondering if we would have enough.  We ended up with loads of food!  We had bhajis (garlic and onion concoctions), raita (a cucumber yogurt sort of dip for the bhajis), saag (lamb and spinach curry), paneer korma (paneer is a kind of cheese, but it isn't like any kind of American cheese and korma is a creamy sauce...I made this one, by the way!), garlic naan (bread), paratha (a flat bread), rice, and a roast chicken!  For 9 people.  We actually did an impressive job of consuming most of the food!

the naan bread is in the centre, and the paneer korma is in the left of the picture)

the roast chicken and the paneer korma

To top it all off, I made a really easy to make batch of "Oaty Biscuits" which are just a cookie made with oats, brown sugar, coconut, and maple syrup as the main ingredients.  It was a very late night by the time I got home, but a very fun one as well.