'Shrooms With A View, Sage & Rosemary Too

Once, not long ago, I ranted about dry herbs here. I'm not about to eat crow (now that's another post) or my words, or even dried herbs, but as some of you pointed out in that post, dried rosemary is an exception, as I discovered today.

My aunt in the US, with whom I stayed in July, has several herbs in her garden - sage, rosemary, French tarragon, two kinds of basil, chives, mint and a few others. I would often pick a few leaves off the plants and pop them into my mouth, enjoying the fresh and spicy feel. When I was leaving, she picked some fresh sage for me, which held up rather spotlessly till today, and gave me her stash of dried sage and rosemary. A creative cook, she uses permutations and combinations of these herbs to flavour all her cooking, even Indian food, and I decided to do the same, though I did not employ any logic except that of the palate.

After years, I bought mushrooms recently and they blackened only a little bit after two days, unlike earlier when they would do so very rapidly. I also had two slabs of paneer/cottage cheese that needed to be used up fast so I decided to throw it all into a big stir-fry and flavour it with these herbs.


Here's what you need:

Onion: 1 big, thickly sliced
Button mushrooms: 2-3 cups, halved
Paneer/cottage cheese: 2-3 cups, cubed
Red chilli flakes: 1-2 tsp
Garlic: 10 cloves
Sage: 6-7 leaves
Olive oil: 2 tbsp + 1 tsp
Salt: To taste
Rosemary: A sprig or two

Grind the garlic, red chilli and half of the sage roughly with 1 tsp of olive oil - I did this with a stone pestle and mortar.

In a large wok, heat the olive oil and add the above ground mixture. Saute for a few seconds.

Now add the onions, saute for a minute on high flame, then the mushrooms and the cottage cheese.

Saute again for a minute, and add salt.

Lower flame.

The mushrooms give out some water, let this dry up but keep turning constantly so as not to burn the dish.

You can choose to let some oily juice remain - good to mop up with bread - or dry it completely.

Now crumble some dried rosemary over the top and mix it lightly. Serve.

This goes off to Weekend Herb Blogging, Kalyn's event, managed by Haalo and hosted this week by Prof Kitty at The Cabinet of Prof. Kitty.

Weekend Herb Blogging Mushrooms Vegetarian Dried herbs Sage Rosemary Paneer/Cottage cheese

Legumes, And a Bit of Cheese

A few weeks ago, our air-conditioner went kaput and we spent as much of the day as we could outside our house. Quite a few air-conditioned stores that day saw us wandering about aimlessly, touching and feeling the goods, never buying. Our last stop before we went to dinner in another air-conditioned place, was a bookstore. Or rather, as large bookstores tend to be, a books, music and gifts store.

For a while now, my favourite bedtime reading has been cookbooks, when mysteries and chicklit are hard to come by, and though my conscience knows I don't need any more cookbooks, I succumbed when I saw this well-produced book called Pumpkin Flower Fritters on Bengali cooking. I told myself that it had recipes my other Bengali cookbooks didn't, paid for it, and walked out without daring to look at it any longer in case the guilt got compounded.

It turned out my justifications to myself were well-justified - it DID contain some recipes that my other books didn't. Here's one recipe that I tried from it - it's unusual in that paneer/cottage cheese is mixed with moong dal, delicately flavoured, very heavy, and I don't think I'll try it again.

It's not really this yellow!

Warning: The quantities here make A LOT!

Roasted split moong dal: 250 gm
Paneer: 15-16 pieces
Potatoes: 2-3, medium-sized, cubed (The book recommends 8-10 small new potatoes, halved)
Chopped ginger: 2 tsp
Green chillies: 8-10

Crush
Cardamom: 2-3
Cinnamon: 3-4 pieces

Tempering
Red chillies: 2-3, broken into pieces
Cumin seeds/jeera: 1 tsp
Fennel: 1/2 tsp
Bay leaves: 2

Sugar: 1 tsp
Salt, to taste
Oil: 2 tsp
Ghee: A little

Boil the dal in hot water. Cook till half done. Set aside.

Heat the oil in a pan, fry the paneer pieces and remove. Fry the potatoes.

Add to the dal, and boil till cooked. Add half the chopped ginger and sugar.

Heat more oil in the pan and add a little ghee.

Add the red chilli pieces, cumin seeds, fennel, and bay leaves. Now add the rest of the ginger and the crushed garam masala.

Add the dal.

Bring to a boil and add the panee pieces and green chillies.

Simmer a few minutes.

This goes off to Susan's My Legume Love Affair, hosted this month by Annarasa.

MLLA Paneer/Cottage Cheese Lentils/Moong Dal Potatoes Vegetarian Bengali Humour

A Date With A Broken Heart

In my previous post, I mentioned how we ran away from home two Sundays ago and finished off the day in a restaurant where the service was very slow. For that meal, I had ordered a 'health salad' - fruits in a citrus-honey dressing topped with dates, a tender coconut drink with lime and mint and Dil Ke Tukde, the restaurant's fancy name for Shahi Tukda, the Hyderabadi dessert of fried bread topped with cream and nuts.

Dil Ke Tukde is a curious name for something that should give you joy, but it turned out to be rather apt because it broke my heart into several pieces. On the rare occasion that I eat dessert, did I have to be confronted with stale, fried bread fried in rancid, re-used oil, most of it so toughened I couldn't cut it with a spoon? And whatever substituted the cream on top, did it have to be so warm? The entire dish was neither cool nor cold nor hot, and only my maturity stood in the way of my pronouncing the entire day a failure because of the failed dessert.

I was determined to right the wrong, however, and this past Friday evening, bought some bread and condensed milk to make my own Shahi Tukda. However, when Saturday morning rolled around, the thought of frying bread, pounding nuts and such tasks made me weary. The Net had some recipes for a quick paneer burfi so I added to all that and came up with my own stuff. At the end of it all, there was more condensed milk than paneer in that recipe. It was extremely sweet and that kept me from eating more than one piece at a time.



Condensed milk, sweetened: 400 gm (1 tin)/ 19 tbsp
Paneer: 200 gm
Dates, seedless: A fistful
Bread: 4-5 slices, crusts removed
Ghee - to grease the baking dish

Whiz all the above in a blender. Pour into a greased baking dish, cover with foil and bake in a pre-heated oven at 200 C for 30-40 minutes or till a toothpick/knife inserted into centre comes out clean. Let cool completely and cut into pieces. It gets much harder after you put it in the fridge, and it's tougher to cut, but it is more burfi-like.

I'm sending this off to Valli's Mithai Mela.

Mithai Mela Paneer/Cottage Cheese Dates Condensed milk Sweet Burfi Bread Humour Dessert Eating+out

In Memory Of ...

If you were alarmed at reading that headline, don’t be. It’s not directly about anyone shaking off the mortal coils, it’s just about how their families choose to perpetuate their memories after they do.

Of course, this piece will also take into account how people ensure you remember the auspicious occasions too. The method is largely similar – give away steel/silver items engraved with the name of the dead or the stars of the occasion. I’m not sure if this custom exists elsewhere, but it certainly does in the South, especially in my home State of Andhra Pradesh, and quite a few utensils in many homes are courtesy such fortunate/unfortunate events. Party favours, if you can call them that, only, the party needn’t have been for anything very joyful!

I’ve tried to find out how and why the custom started but all I can gauge is that as ceremonies of all sorts got grander, the turmeric and kumkum and coconut and betel leaf doled out at poojas and weddings began to be accompanied by more permanent keepsakes. Depending on your finances, competitive spirit or a conventional or need-to-reciprocate mindset, you choose between a steel tumbler, plate or vessel or the same in silver and maybe even gold. (Actually, I don’t think silver or gold objects are given away at death ceremonies; I have also seen copies of the Gita being distributed.) Nowadays, some of us choose to give out china or porcelain, and I am glad for the variety – they look good in the glass cabinet, and I can use them for the blog!

My Dad tells of how his father, his attention diverted at lunch by one such tumbler duly engraved with the name of the dead and the date of the passing, roared at no one in particular that all “these dirty, wretched, morbid, depressing dishes” should be thrown out of the house. When Grandad left this world six years ago, he had no say in the matter, and we had a merry discussion on the memento we should choose to hand out to the attendees at the final death ceremony. “A steel tumbler,” said one. “Come on, tumblers are passé, let’s think of something different,” said another. “How about a dabba (container)?” “No, too common, what about a tray?” “Ah, but not everyone (read domestic help) will use trays,” pointed out another. Ultimately, however, we settled on trays, procured several hundreds of them and issued them to all those who attended.

I was in charge, with an aunt, of collaring these people as they left the venue, making sure they didn’t leave trayless, but in the bargain, found myself facing one or two who came back for seconds. “Er … but didn’t you just take one?” I asked a guy who had demanded one just 10 minutes ago, claiming he was the postman. “Yes, but I need one more,” he said. At this point, my aunt said, “No, only one per person,” and that was the end of that.

Of course, you have to make sure that you give out one favour per couple, and ensure, amidst all the chaos, that everybody has got one. “Hey, did my mother-in-law get one? She came specially for this occasion,” says a harried daughter-in-law, while someone else says, “Listen, make sure you give so-and-so a couple – last time, they let us know they didn’t get one.” Then there are those families which, once they get the load from their daughter-in-law’s parents, decide it’s too good to share with all and sundry, and end up keeping quite a bit for themselves. (It’s a widespread tradition for the bride’s parents to supply the groom’s family with boxes full of sweets, which the latter distributes when the daughter-in-law arrives at their home.)

Death and marriage are not the only occasions. There’s the housewarming, birthday parties, Satyanarayana Vratams and the pre-puberty and puberty functions. (Now, why can’t we have a nice, euphemistic term like ‘coming of age’ to describe these - whenever I enter a hotel and see these events announced so bluntly, my delicate sensibilities are offended.)

In many homes, every time we get containers of something special from family and friends, we read the inscription on the dish to make sure it’s theirs before we send it back. “In memory of K. Subba Rao, 9.9.1998” has to be the dabba of a cousin whose husband’s maternal uncle bore that name, while a similar dish inscribed with another Subba Rao of a different initial (or Appa Rao or Krishna Rao or Venkata Rao) would be our neighbour’s. Some have their names inscribed just to ensure they don't get mixed up.

I’ve got a motley collection of such stuff which keeps going in and out of my house, some which others insist isn’t theirs but mine alright, but for the life of me, I don’t know who Swetha is, and why her “flower-adornment ceremony” (???) dabba is in my kitchen!

Note: All names and dates are entirely fictional and any match with any persons, other creatures and objects dead or alive is purely coincidental.

What does all this have to do with the paneer recipe I’m presenting here? Well, the steel dish you see in the picture is one such favour, and I really enjoy using it – I haven't checked to see if it’s of the ‘in memoriam’ variety or the happy variety, but I’m glad to have it.

Paneer – 200 gm, cubed
Tomato puree – 3 tbsp
Ginger – 1-inch piece
Bay leaves – 3
Cumin seed – ½ tsp
Turmeric – ½ tsp
Coriander powder – 1-1/2 tsp
Red chilli powder – 1 tsp
Salt – to taste
Cashew nuts – 2 tbsp
Almonds, blanched – 2 tbsp
Oil – 3 tsp
Water – ¾ cup + ½ cup
Kasoori methi/dried fenugreek leaves – 1 tbsp

Grind the cashew, almonds, cumin and ginger to a paste with a little water.

Heat the oil in a wok. Add the bay leaf. Lower flame and add the paste. Stir.

Stir-fry for 10 minutes till the paste leaves the sides of the wok.

Add the red chilli powder, coriander powder and turmeric. Cook for half a minute.

Add the tomato puree. Cook for 3-4 minutes.

Add ¾ cup water. Boil.

Add the salt and the kasoori methi.

Lower flame and add the ½ cup of water, cook for a few minutes till it reaches the consistency you want. Or you could skip this step if the consistency is good enough for you.

Add paneer to the gravy, cook for about 5-7 minutes till heated well through. Serve.

Please keep those entries coming for AFAM-Pomegranate.

Paneer Party favours/favors Steel dabba Cashew Almonds Tomato puree Wedding favours Ceremonies Death Ceremonies Humour Social commentary

A recipe and a reminder

Remind me to never, ever fry paneer. I never do, even when it's recommended, but did that in the interests of authenticity as I make Kashmiri dishes so rarely, but it just made the entire thing rubbery even though I kept it soaked in some water.

Even a half measure like shallow-frying it robbed it of its texture, something The Spouse demonstrated long ago. But the gravy was quite a scorcher if you could discount the oily blobs that overran it. This is my third Grindless Gravy for the event, and it just makes the deadline. What's happening with your entries? If they're sitting in your drafts, please rush them as the deadline ends today.

On to the recipe now, adapted from The Pleasures of Kashmiri Cookery by Anu Wakhlu.

Cottage Cheese/Paneer - 500 gm, cut into 3-cm squares.
Red Chilli Powder - 1 tbsp
Aniseed Powder - 1 tbsp
Ginger Powder/Sonth - 1/2 tbsp
Curds/Yoghurt - 2 tbsp, beaten
Black Cardamom/Badi Elaichi - 2
Regular Cardamom (Green) - 2
Cloves - 3
Peppercorns - 2-3
Bay leaves - 2-3
Oil - 2 tbsp
Water - 2 cups
Salt - to taste

In a pan, heat the oil. Add the red chilli powder and a little water and heat till bright red.

Add the beaten curds and fry for a few minutes. Add all the spices and salt and mix well.

Add 2 cups of water and let it boil.

Add the cottage cheese pieces and cover and cook on a slow fire for about 20 minutes till the gravy thickens.

According to the book, the paneer has to be deep-fried beforehand. Also, once the curry is done, it's finished off with a splash of ghee and shahjeera (caraway) for garnish - I only shallow-fried the paneer, which was bad enough, and didn't have the ghee so didn't use that, or the shahjeera.

PS: Anita has a tip on frying paneer in the comments, take a look.

Grindless Gravies Curds/Yoghurt Paneer/Cottage Cheese Kashmiri

Of Candid Beel & Uncold Water

Add hot pups and fried france to the list. Along with umbercut steak patata. Snakes. And more. And you have a glorious mélange of what’s on offer in the little and not-so-little stores and restaurants all over India.

Those of you from South India must be familiar with hot pups. For those of you who are not, this is the name hot puffs go by in some establishments. Flaky or not-so-flaky pastry filled with a dark mass of spicy curry, with bits of green and orange peeping out if it’s vegetarian. The realization that pups could be a corruption of puffs came about in a rather chastening way – somebody much older than us pronounced it so and it set us sniggering, till they said something that made us realize things like those weren’t important. But they still amuse; though they don’t raise a mocking laugh any longer, they do prompt a gentle one.

Snakes, of course, are snacks. A “pig mutton” stall is a place that sells pork. Candid beel is candied peel - remember the big, sticky glass jars, containing multicoloured pieces of peel, hog plums traditionally coloured red and branded cherries, and the preserved raw papaya we know as tutti frutti? Uncold water is an ingenious phrase to differentiate between refrigerated and unrefrigerated bottled/mineral water that is stocked in the store. Uncold is cheaper, usually priced at MRP (maximum retail price), cold is costlier as the storekeeper has incurred expenses on electricity while chilling it. (I’ve read it’s against the rules to charge more for chilled bottled water, though.)

When I accompanied The Spouse on some official work to a temple town, the aspirational/tourist-pleasing aspect of small town India blended with the constraints of vegetarianism were evident in the restaurant of the hotel we stayed in. There was a variety of mystifying stuff on the menu but what truly perplexed me was umbercut steak patata. What on earth was it? Should I order and find out or safely stick to the less arcane selections on the menu? I stuck to the safe option. But the umbercut wouldn’t leave my mind – I turned it over and over and over till the penny dropped, quite suddenly – it was meant to be hamburger steak with potato! Yes, for the scores of foreign tourists who came to this place with its temple and its world-famous ashram, the hamburger patty, made of potato and not meat, would be the bridge between spirituality and their non-vegetarian homelands!

And with that, I leave you with a recipe for Fried France.

Medium-size prawns, shelled, de-veined: 500 gm
(Paneer/cottage cheese can substitute this)
Onions, minced: 2
Green chillies, chopped: 2
Tomatoes, chopped: 2
Coriander/cilantro, chopped: A cupful
Turmeric: ½ tsp
Salt: To taste
Chilli powder: 1 tsp
Cumin powder: 1 tsp
Coriander powder: 1-1/2 tsp
Oil: 2-3 tbsp (or less)

Heat the oil, fry the prawns till they turn pink and opaque.

Now add the onions, fry till brown.

Add the green chillies, sauté.

Now add the chopped tomatoes, mix well.

Now go in the powdered spices and salt. Mix well and sauté.

Garnish with chopped coriander.

Somebody who tasted this said the prawns were slightly tough, and that could be because they were fried first and continued to cook as the rest of the stuff was being added. However, she said it was tasty.
I even tried a vegetarian version with paneer/cottage cheese a couple of days later, and it worked well.

Indian English Fried France Fried prawns Paneer/cottage cheese

Paneer Makhmali

All I need to do is enjoy the rain beating an irregular tattoo on my windowsill, revel in my fever for which I took the day off from work and curl up with a mystery under a reading lamp, but here I am at my computer, under the glare of tubelights, trying to post something. It’s not even as if I badly want to post this or that I’m meeting some deadline I set for myself, but sleeplessness and a regularity with which I now gravitate towards the blogs that’s making me do this. Posting doesn’t feel like a chore, though – it’s quite a mixed-up feeling.

From the confusing to the simple: what I have for you today is a paneer/cottage cheese recipe. It’s taken from Nita Mehta’s book Still More Paneer, and the only change I made was to use mango ginger instead of the regular ginger.
That's mango ginger in the photo.

This gravy is a velvety affair (hence the name Makhmal, from the Persian), given that the ingredients are pressure cooked and ground, the base being coconut milk. It’s something of a shocker, essentially being paneer in tomato chaaru (rasam/soup South Indian style, with a dash of tempering), but it’s not as odd a match as it sounds. On to the recipe, then:

Paneer/cottage cheese – 200 gm, cubed

Pressure cook (2 whistles) with ½ a cup of water:
Tomatoes – 4, chopped roughly
Coconut milk – ½ cup
Mango ginger or ginger – 1-inch piece, chopped
Garlic – 8-10 cloves, skinned, chopped
Green chillies – 2, chopped roughly
Salt – to taste

Cool and puree in the mixer.

For the tempering:
Mustard seed – 1 tsp
Red chillies – 2, broken
Curry leaves – a sprig
Oil – 1 tsp

Transfer the puree back into the pressure cooker, bring to a boil.

Add the paneer and simmer for 4-5 minutes. Check for the consistency of your liking. Switch off the heat.

In a separate pan, heat the oil, pop the mustard, add the red chillies. Remove from fire, add the curry leaves, and add to the pressure cooker.

You can find a somewhat similar recipe here.

Paneer/Cottage Cheese Coconut milk Tomatoes Mango ginger

Ever the Twain Shall Meet

Apologies to Rudyard Kipling, but this is Pepper Paneer Pasta! Does the alliteration set your teeth on edge? Or is it the combination that’s doing it? Are you thinking, ‘Oh, no! unholy combination, I’d rather go somewhere else?’ Are your fingers snaking towards the next link on a self-rescue mission?

I would probably feel the same way too, if I were to see this elsewhere. But as it happens, it’s my blog, my copy of Tarla Dalal’s Microwave Subzis, an unhealthy overdose of salt (my doing) plus a birthday gift of organic wholewheat pasta that inspired this dish. And the ingredient that gave me the notion this paneer/cottage cheese dish could be added to pasta was the Spouse, who said the cream and pepper in it reminded him of pasta.

The photo is all white and brown and singularly unattractive, but believe me, the paneer and the pasta combine well!

The cream in my pantry was fast approaching its best-by date and after the bread pudding, this was one more dish that offered me a route to its (the cream’s) salvation. And when I saw this book in the store, I had to buy it. Not only was it reasonably priced, it had several illustrations. And in the heat of the Indian summer, the promise of quick cooking in my small and hot kitchen, made all the more difficult by windows closed to prevent the visit of an unfriendly rodent, was a Godsend! (If you’re wondering why couldn’t she open the windows as she began cooking and close them when she finished, it’s because I’ve to climb on to the kitchen ledge, open the mosquito netting the rat/mouse bit into, open the windows, descend, cook, then climb back up, close windows, stick netting back in place, and climb down – that’s too much hassle and too many calories more than I can afford to lose - yeah, right!)

Now that my post is long and chatty enough, let’s cut to the chase. Here’s how I made the Pepper Paneer – the measures are mine, not the author’s.

What you need:
200 gm paneer/cottage cheese, cut into ½-inch cubes
6 tbsp heavy cream
3 tbsp milk
2 tsp oil
Salt to taste

Grind to a coarse paste:
½ cup chopped onion
9-10 cashewnuts
1 tsp ginger-garlic paste
2 tsp peppercorns

Combine the oil and the paste in a microwave-proof bowl and microwave on High for two minutes.

Add the cream, milk and salt, mix well and microwave on High for 30 seconds.

Add the paneer, mix well and microwave on High for 1 minute.

Taste at this stage. If it’s fine, you can stop there and eat it with rotis or naans or whatever. If it’s too salty, one of the options is to mix it with pasta and not waste it, like I did.

For the pasta:
Add two handfuls of wholewheat maccheroni rigati to 2 cups of boiling water. Boil for 9 minutes, drain, lubricate with a splash of edible oil if you like (not necessary) and immediately toss with pepper paneer.

Bon appetit!

I'm sending this off to Presto Pasta Nights hosted by Ruth of Once Upon a Feast.

Pasta Cashew Wholewheat Paneer/Cottage Cheese Cream Pepper Vegetarian

Jiffy cheese ’n peas

(DRY MATAR PANEER)

All the visiting and eating that goes with Deepavali makes for a very lazy cook the next day. But the demands of a potluck meal call out loud, so to balance my lassitude with those and come up with a dressy dish, I made this stir-fry of cottage cheese and fresh peas. If you use fresh peas or dried peas soaked overnight, boil them till soft/pressure-cook them for one whistle. It’s even faster if you use frozen peas. You can use tofu in place of the cottage cheese. And oh yes, don’t forget to season the peas with some salt while they boil!

Here’s how:
225 gm/2 big fistfuls of cottage cheese/tofu, cubed
A cup of peas, shelled & boiled
A tsp of oil
3 green chillies, slit
½ a tsp of cumin/jeera
Some salt and cracked pepper
Coriander leaves/cilantro for garnish

Heat oil in a pan, put in cumin. Once in splutters, put in the chillies, saute for a few seconds, then put in the peas and sauté for a while. If you’re using frozen peas, put in a teensy-weensy bit of salt and mix. Now put in the cottage cheese/tofu and sauté again. All this can be done on low/medium heat – make sure the cheese doesn’t stick to the pan. Now check for seasoning and add a little more salt if necessary, turning once again. The cheese might splutter a bit but don’t worry, it will stop soon. Now add the coriander leaves, stir lightly, turn off the heat and sprinkle with cracked pepper. Turn once more et voila, dry matar paneer is ready!
PS: Am testing comment moderation