Cooking like my mother

Its no secret that i love to cook. But I like planning and cooking for something occasions. Over last 10 years or so, I have been donating a home cooked Indian Vegetarian meal for fund raisers for my kids schools and other organizations. The idea is simple - The person who buys the meal gets to host the party for their friends and family at their house while I cook and provide food. It is great way for me to connect and offer my cooking to somebody who may not have had chance to taste home style Indian cooking. Last year, I offered a home cooked Indian vegetarian meal for an auction fundraiser for our neighborhood school. The item was bought by a lovely couple in the neighborhood who gathered with their friends this January over the meal I provided. Most of the guests had traveled to India and tasted Indian cuisine in India. It was a wonderful way to connect with such wonderful group of neighbors and share stories of their travel and experiences in India. Here I share the menu

I have had the recipe for a long time but for some reason, it just sat there in my recipe drawer. Every now and then, i will draw it out as the "next" thing to try but never ended up trying it. The recipe calls for a large oven safe pot for cooking, preferably a cast iron dutch oven. Last week I decided to sneak in an order of a 5 quart cast iron dutch oven while I was ordering other things from Amazon. It came earlier this week and I got baking. Recipe A web search of no knead bread turns up lot of different food blogs with videos, images etc.  All those were very helpful to understand the instructions in details and gain confidence. For the proportions and recipe. I decided to follow the paper recipe (also available at New York times here).  Only problem I ran into is that recipe calls for 1 and 5/8th cups of water. I figured 5/8th of a cup is same as the 1/2 + 1/8th of a cup (I was feeling very proud to have used my math skills for these calculations!). I eye ba