Yet another birthday party post... Blogging Marathon 2014 Post 15

This was when a younger cousin and me were living in separate hostels and her older sister and friends had moved out, had joined work and some of them sharing a flat together. From our South Mumbai perspective, Borivili was a journey!  Well, so it was elder cousin's birthday and her sister decided to throw a surprise party where we would surprise cook for her, and buy a Dutch Truffle cake from Croissants.

 After our day at college was done, we met up at Churchgate, and bough the cake. The cake survived Mumbai rush hour crowd and we were finally at Borivili. One of the dishes on the plan was corn-palak. Don't ask me, not my idea. Borivili station area is one place always thronged with crowds. The two of us and the precious cake, jostled returning office-goers and hordes of public and bargained (we had to) for the palak, corn etc. We also thought to buy fruits for the fruit salad.

Finally, we took a rick home. Now, in that temporary set-up, there was only one hot-plate to cook, though 3  pressure cookers!!!  And the plan was to make rice, corn-palak, french-fries and fruit-salad. We also had to decorate the place, so one of us did the cleaning and chopping (which took ages with the palak, we had no idea it would), and the other rushed down to buy some balloons and decoration stuff. All this took time and it was 7 pm already. The hot plate was never given a moment's rest, I remember, as we were trying to get things done. By 8 pm, the flat residents started trooping in and they were also enthusiastic to the party idea. Thankfully, my cousin was  a bit late.

We had completely hi-jacked the kitchen and the hot plate, so the other two flat-mates (who, thankfully were good friends) too could not get to making dinner or eating anything. They waited, good naturedly, of course, but dinner was taking just too long. I had no experience of cooking then and maybe my younger cousin was good but hot-plate was taking it's own time. Since we had stupidly cut-up fruits for the fruit-salad, one entire pressure cooker of it, just to tick one thing off our lists, we offered slightly darkened fruit salad to all, with promises to serve dinner soon.

The corn-palak took ages, and then the frying of the french fries, which disappeared as soon as they were done, 5 very hungry people in the house, including the cooks. 11 and my cousin was still to get back, those were days when cell-phones were rare, pagers more in, we couldn't even get in touch with her. By the time she did get back, the other two flatmates had slept having a dinner of corn-palak, french fries and fruit salad. We'd promised to wake them up for dinner, once done, and the cake-cutting. For the one friend, that was waiting up, and us, we kept frying french fries. Had to make another trip down for oil, just before the shops were closing down!

So, sometime after 12, my cousin got back to a flat where we were all almost asleep waiting for her. She had gone out with friends, unsuspecting of our plans. We woke all those asleep and had a very sleepy cake party. The food, which finally got done but no one was hungry anymore,  was put in the fridge for next day. My younger cousin and me were too tired to talk about our semi fiasco of that day, we'd put in a lot of effort certainly. Everybody had a mandatory dabba to carry to work and college. I have never eaten corn-palak for some reason after that day.