We had a brilliant night last Saturday and for the first time Ma Rani, Pa Graham and I decided that we would sit down with our guests and eat! It was a lot of fun and I for one really appreciated having the time to chat to everyone a lot more. We still had to prepare dishes in between courses but that is the nature of our food! The evening didn’t finish until nearly 3am, staying that late isn’t required of you but you can relax for the  evening and stay as long as you wish…..

Georgie was no help at all. She refuses to lift a finger in helping me with the front of house preparations....

We served Paneer and Vegetable Kebabs and Stuffed Mushrooms as a starter ~ the kebabs always go down very well and whilst the weather is good we are trying to use the barbeque as much as possible for some of the dishes. The mushrooms are filled with crumbled paneer mixed with our Masala sauce and topped with sliced paneer, before going on the barbeque until lightly browned

Preparing the kebabs. The Paneer had been marinaded in our masala sauce

...ready for the barbeque

Stuffed Mushrooms

We served stuffed homegrown courgettes with a sweet and spicy chutney, made from fruit brought over by some friends of ours who live in spain.

There is nothing more satisfying (and rewarding) than picking your vegetables ready to serve a few hours later. We have quite a few courgette plants in the garden now!

Washed and ready to go!The courgettes are prepared and ready to be filled.

I took this photograph mid eating! Hence the slightly untidy look of the plate! Stuffed courgette served with our spanish sweet & spicy chutney

Quail's Egg wrapped in a spicy minced lamp casing

Once cooked in the oven our Nargis meatballs are ready to serve. My great-granmother actually made hers with pigeons' eggs'. Ma Rani can tell you more about the recipes that have been developed from East Africa to the Punjab to Northfleet!!

 

Preparing the Fish Masala

Watermelon & Champagne ready to stay in the freezer. Taken out ten minutes before serving

Watermelon & Champagne Sorbet (mint leaf as added decoration!)

 So we have some more dates in September and October, we are looking forward to meeting and cooking for those of you who have booked already. Lets hope the weather stays for a bit longer!

Saira x

Another great night! Write up and pictures to follow shortly!

Grandma’s quail egg meatballs went down a treat!

x

Have a wonderful summer! We have added new dates for september. Our next supperclubs are coming from Drouix in France, both for charity. Very much looking forward to a using a different setting! We also have a summer of private parties but we are most definately not neglecting our supperclub. Thank you to everyone who has made the experience so enjoyable thus far, we’ve made some new friends, learnt new things and fuelled our passion to create and cook old and new dishes.  Write ups will follow and lots of pictures! As always please book a place via e-mail at jogindersupperclub@hotmail.com

Saira & Rani xx

One of our guests who is a journalist from LA wrote:

{{Joginder’s Supper Club in  Tufnell Park  takes on the atmosphere of a large family dinner.

Guests – a mixed group of 20-something Bohemians, journalists, and middle-aged professors – sit in the garden at a long table decorated with tablecloths  with rich Indian patterns and colors. Spontaneously, they swap seats to talk to others who had been complete strangers less than an hour before. The conversation – which ranges from school-day anecdotes to politics – flows naturally, as though these strangers have known each other all of their lives.

Meanwhile, the lovely smell of coriander wafts through the space as guests munch happily on traditional Indian finger-foods such as vegetable samosas.

Rani Baker uses recipes from her Indian mother and relies on her daughter to help with the cooking. The primary satisfaction the Bakers get from their supper club comes from interaction with strangers.

“It’s just a hobby, really,” daughter Saira Baker says. “We just enjoy cooking and meeting people.”}}

Thank you Natalie – we enjoyed meeting you and delighted that you enjoyed our food. Have fun in Paris and Dubrovnik.

We are gearing up for next saturday and fingers crossed for good weather. I do not have a tandoor oven so I really do need my Bar-B-Q!!!

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I do not find it difficult to cook ‘Panjabi’ summer food.

Why?

Because when I was growing up in East Africa, where I was born, we ate according to the availability of food. Admittedly much of it was grown in our garden and I do have vague memories( When I was about 6) of sitting under tomato bushes helping myself and to this day I love tomatoes!

Sadly I have left it too late to have fresh tomatoes on the menu on Saturday, but the courgettes are ready and they will be served to our guests. The smell of these beauties that have grown in my garden is something quite wonderful.  It is not an amazing thing to do  as they are really easy to grow well  but you do need the time to water them copious amounts of water twice a day!

A dish on the menu  causing me some concern has been the availability of quail’s eggs. Apparently it is really mean to eat them! I remember a young student at school bringing me some eggs to ‘eat’ as she did not want them wasted  – she bred them!

Waitrose came to the rescue. I love their food and the quail’s eggs were only delivered today so I am trying the recipe tomorrow! I use them because it is my Grandma’s recipe, and I am pretty sure that she actually  used ‘pigeon’s’ eggs – plentiful in the Punjab in the 1890’s!!

The best thing we ever did was to buy an ice cream maker. I had been making our ice cream and sorbet without one since we first started our supperclub. I thought an ice cream maker would take the fun out of it but it hasn’t. I’m trying out different combinations of fruit (and vegetables!) as a sorbet and a kulfi so who know’s what will be put in front of you for dessert!

In the meantime here is my recipe for ‘Saira’s Strawberry & Mint Sorbet’. Perfect after a heavy meal or to have during the day when that sun is really hot. I’m going to Spain in a few weeks and my sorbet recipes are going with me!

Saira’s Strawberry & Mint Sorbet

Ingredients:

500g Fresh Strawberries

6 good size mint leaves

5 tablespoons Sugar

200ml water

1. Cut the strawberries in half and then into quarters. Place in a bowl big enough to fit in your fridge

2. Chop up the mint leaves and sprinkle over the strawberries

3. Sprinkle 3 tablespoons of sugar over the strawberries and mint and then place the bowl in your fridge to chill (the great thing is you can leave them for an hour or all day depending on when you are going to make the sorbet)

4. To make the sugar and water mixture, bring 200ml of water to the boil in a heavy based saucepan. Once boiling, add 2 tablespoons of sugar. Reduce the heat to a simmer and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Continue to simmer for 1 minute.

5. Pour the mixture into a heat-resistant jug and place in the fridge to chill

When you are ready to make your sorbet….

Pour the strawberries and mint into the blender and add the sugar and water as you blend into a runny mixture. Don’t be put of by the strawberry pips, they are meant to stay in the mixture!

For the ice cream maker;

Pour the mixture into your ice cream maker, turn on and leave for 40-45 minutes. Do check it often though. Once your sorbet is ready, serve straight from the mixer or place in a tub and pop in the freezer until you are ready to use it.

For the freezer;

Pour you mixture into a freezer tub and place in the freezer for 1 hour 30 minutes. You will need to gently stir your mixture regularly for at least 30 minutes to achieve a smooth sorbet consistency

Serve on its own, with other sorbet or a really nice vanilla ice cream ~ perfect with a glass of Cava!

I served it with homemade Raspberry and Lemon sorbet

We hosted our biggest supperclub to date and the first in the garden. The weather was so good to us on the day. I did have to lay the table at the last-minute as the sun was either melting the candles or heating up the wine glasses! We had twelve to supper, including The London Foodie who brought along three other diners, a local couple, a singleton and a group of young people who were enjoying an evening out and our supperclub was the middle part of their evening! 

Our menu was pretty ambitious this time, more dishes than we usually do and two barbeques on the go. One for the vegetarian food and one for our vast amount of Chicken Tikka kebabs. Pa Graham was roped into some of the cooking this time as we served up our Panjabi Tapas style food – not including the main course ( I feel full just writing it!). It was a little nod towards Spain being in the world cup final, but none of the family were supporting them. One guest asked where the Dutch element was for the evening. Erm…something Dutch, I thought looking around the garden, racking my brains for something on the menu that was vaguely Dutch in origin. Just as I was about to laugh at being biased towards the Spanish, a selection of flags from around the world caught my eye. There, in between New Zealand and Cameroon was the Dutch flag…hurrah! I should point out that Action Man is randomly positioned on the trellis and has been for the last 16 years, so having a selection of flags from around the world in the garden was nothing unusual either. 

The Sangria Work Station - I got the recipe from a Spanish friend of mine and yes a whole bottle of red goes into one jug.

We started an hour earlier this time around and boy did we feel the pressure more. Everything was ready but both Ma Rani and I had a real sense of being nervous about the evening. We needn’t have worried because as the first guests arrived and sipped on their Sangria cocktails it was all systems go in the kitchen (I should start doing pub quizzes with my parents as we do make a good team) 

Perfect weather, thank goodness!

Getting ready to barbeque....

With everyone seated around the table, the courses started flowing from the kitchen. Our homemade minted lamb samosa and mixed vegetable samosa went down very well, they are so fiddly to make but well worth it when I collect empty plates! 

Our Paneer kebabs went down well too, the pieces having been marinated in a spicy masala sauce for two hours and then skewered with green pepper and tomato before cooking on the barbeque . We served these with Raita. By now the conversation (and the Cava) was flowing and the great thing about being seated around one big table was that there was either one topic going around the table or two or three going on at the same time. Nobody was shy to get up and move around the table. This is the first time this has happened here at Joginder’s Supperclub, but don’t worry I won’t make it compulsory to swap places after each course! 

Our fish course proved popular, particularly the King Prawns in a spicy sauce served with Paratha. The Talipia fish pieces were slow cooked on the barbeque.

King Prawns in a spicy sauce.

Animated conversation!

We served up Vegetable Biryani and our Chicken Masala for the main course, and not wanting to fill everyone up too much the bowls were distributed at each end of the table for everyone to help themselves. Once the main course had been served it was time for Ma Rani to pour herself a glass of wine and sit down with the guests (my job is never done – she will tell me off for saying that). The ice cream maker was turned on and my strawberry and mint mixture took no time at all to turn into sorbet. The night before I had made a lemon sorbet and a raspberry and framboise sorbet. The three were served together, however the heat meant that everything was melting alot quicker so I ‘marathon walked’ the desserts out to everybody! 

The trio of sorbet

We had a brilliant evening, were rushed of our feet, guests came in and out of the kitchen to chat to us and everyone got on really well ( the last guests left at 1am) I love our supperclubs and how appreciative people. We are appreciative too, because it is something that mum and I love to do and it makes it very worthwhile when you meet new people. Some of whom keep returning, others who feel like friends already and those who have never been to a supperclub before and because of us they are ready to book up for others in and around London. Particular thanks to Stephen and Duncan who live locally, George the cat doesn’t like being picked up but she let Stephen and not a scratch in sight! 

No problem me taking a few snaps of the guests!

Saturday 31st July ~ Summer Supperclub

Thursday 12th August, Friday 13th, Saturday 14th ~ Joginder’s Supperclub in Drouix, Central France

As always, please e-mail to book!

Saira x

We did our biggest ever supperclub last night and throroughly enjoyed the whole evening. The guests were fantastic and the weather was kind. We welcomed people from around the world which was really good! Write up to follow shortly…legs hurt from standing all day so sunday is our day of rest! More dates to follow for the rest of the month.

x

We are praying for good weather as we complete our shopping list for the  trip to Kingsbury. Usually we are so busy shopping for our fresh ingredients that we forget to take photos but I am determined that on friday we will make up for it.  Unfortunately the tomatoes and courgettes in the garden are not ready – left it a little late to plant them outdoors. Hopefully we will be using them at the next supper club. However, there are enough strawberries for the cocktails and plenty of herbs.

Herbs ready!

Lots of Courgettes to come!

And of course George will be there as the resident ‘Guest’!

George

Love the White Rose and the Deep Purple Clematis

Looking forward to seeing our guests and serving them our delicious Panjabi food.

Spain has just beaten Germany! So it will be a Holland v Spain cup final. My money is on Spain to win on Sunday. I think  we will serve up our food ‘Tappas’ style in anticipation!

We hope you enjoy the garden also but I will try to get some orange and red flowers too!