So tasty!

I know it looks kind of mushy, it wouldn't have if the sauce had been thinned out a bit, but the taste was just heaven. Regular readers of this blog might have picked up that my friend Leisha and I sometimes does some experimental cooking. We have made food ranging from home made marshmallows to black bean and cola soup. On Saturday we did a version of the Indian dish Palak Paneer, and when I told Rose about it she got curious, so I promised to show some pictures and share the recipe we used.

Paneer (fresh cheese):

1 liter full fat milk

juice from 1 lemon

Bring the milk to the boil, add the lemon juice and the milk will split. Once the milk has started to form little clumps, strain the mixture in a cloth

....and hang to drip dry - I left it for approximately 45 min and then gave the bundle a squeeze:

Flatten the cheese mixture a bit and place it in the fridge with some weight on top to squeeze out as much of the leftover moisture as possible. The recipe I found said this would take about 2 hours. It did turn out ok, but was a bit crumbly at the edges and soggy in the center, so I think the next time we do it we'll make the paneer the day before and leave it chilled overnight. And we'll make twice as much ;-)

Sauce:
oil for frying
1 onion - finely chopped
Ginger (1.5" dice finely grated), red chili (1 large chopped finely) and garlic (2 cloves crushed) to taste
1 tbs coriander seeds - crushed
1.5 tsp cumin - ground
3 tomatoes - diced
Spinach - we used 1/2 packet of frozen spinach (if using fresh - chop the leaves a bit)
2 dl yogurt
salt to taste

Cut the paneer into 1" cubes and fry golden in oil, remove from the pan. Fry the onion on low heat till translucent and shiny. Add the spices and let them heat through before adding tomatoes - once the tomatoes goes soft add the spinach, and once it comes to the boil add the yogurt. Let it cook for a couple of minutes, season to taste. The spinach we used had very little water, so we could probably have added some to thin the sauce a bit, but we just added the fried paneer to the mixture and plated it up with some warm naan bread and mango chutney.

Yummmmmm!!!
Hugs and stitches from Anne Ida

PS! The recipe we started out from also had a tbs of tomato paste - we discovered after we had plated the dish that we had forgotten to put it in, but we didn't miss it as far as the taste went.