Tag Archives: spicy

Paneer and a Pen Pal

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So this post is a fun little diversion from my usual experimentation with weird ingredients – except that I still experimented with weird ingredients.  I’m addicted, really.

Anyway, I’ll explain.  This month I finally signed up for “Foodie Pen Pals.”  Lindsay at theleangreenbean.com runs a pen pal program where foodies are paired together to trade food items by mail, and then they blog about what they received at the end of the month.  So this is that blog!

I was excited to receive my package from Ashlee at Twitter handle @missashlee286.  I opened the box to find…

Very considerate that Ashlee had planned a whole family meal for me within our $15 limit!  Maybe I should hire her as our personal chef, because that’s the kind of budget that I should really obey on a more regular basis.

So I was excited to get started, and liked the idea of a chicken curry, but if you know me well you know that chicken isn’t quite weird enough for my strange tastebuds (unless it’s mixed with something strange, of course), so my mind started to veer and swerve until I was at Costco and found this:

A gigantic package of Paneer, or Indian cottage cheese.  The picture really doesn’t do justice to how big it was.  You may be wondering how many people I was looking to feed with a huge double pack of something I had never cooked before, and the answer to that question is two, because there was no way my kids were going to try it.  You may also be wondering, “Why wouldn’t she just go to a regular grocery store and get a teensy pack once she knew that was what she wanted to do,” but again, if you knew me well you would know that I do everything in my power to reduce the number of times I have to wrestle my children in and out of car seats.  If I can buy everything at one store I do, even if it means I’ll be filling my fridge with a supply of cheese that would feed the entire cast of Slumdog Millionaire for a year.

I’ve eaten Paneer from restaurants with peas (mattar paneer), and also with spinach (palak paneer), and I love both, but my family is more partial to peas so I bought a bag of those big enough to feed the island nation of Australia and rushed home to get cooking.  I Googled recipes for a while to figure out what else needed to go in this dish, finding only that ghee (clarified butter which you may remember from Helen Bannerman’s kids’ story is actually made of tigers) and onions were the main elements that were consistent, other than the spice and sauce elements which I was already lucky enough to have received.  So here’s what I did:

Ooh, but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.  I forgot that Ashlee had planned for me to have a kid-friendly appetizer, so I boiled up some grapes in 1/3 bottle of leftover wine and 1/2C sugar, added them to the crackers and Wow butter (awesome substitute for peanut butter which she knew I liked due to earlier blog post – peanut allergic daughter) and made little fake-PB&J snackers.  And before you call the Children’s Aid, Mom (again?), I boiled the wine and sugar together for a good long time so there was no alcohol left when the grapes were coated.

But back to the Easy Mattar Paneer.  SO quick and easy:

  • 2 cups paneer cheese, cut into small cubes
  • 2Tbsp butter – I didn’t have ghee, using regular butter rather than the tiger variety
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 1 package Kitchens of India Curry Paste, or your favourite curry mix or recipe
  • 2 servings of rice, per package directions

Directions:  Melt butter in pan over med-high heat.  Add cubes of paneer, cooking until browned.

Set aside.  Add onion to pan and cook until translucent.  Cook frozen peas in boiling water, drain, and add to pan with onion. Add curry sauce and paneer and cook just until hot.  Serve over rice.

Results: My first foodie pen pal experience was a great success!  Dinner, which I cooked a few nights ago, was enjoyed by all, and I cooked the identical meal again tonight using spinach instead of peas and it was just as good.  I also unloaded a great portion of the leftover paneer on my friend to prepare, so it may be the recipe that keeps on giving.  Thanks again Ashlee!  Recipe Rating:  3 Yums

Bonus Fun Facts about Paneer:  People have been eating it since before 6000BC, and now it’s served as the “McSpicy Paneer,” at McDonald’s India.  It has probably reinvented itself even more often than Madonna has.

 

Horseradish that made my husband whinny

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This entry is only my third, but it has, so far, taken the blue ribbon as far as my husband is concerned.  Little does he know I very nearly poisoned him.

When I entered my beloved discount grocery store to find an experimental food to cook this week, I picked up a giant, gnarly root, and thought, “Okay, giddy up.”  I really did think that, so I had to write it even though doing so makes three horse references in almost as many sentences, so you’ll have to forgive me.  Here is a picture of what it looked like:

But this is where I ran into a problem that may end up being a persistent one through my adventurous cooking exploits.  The root was labelled with the following sign:

When I brought the smelly thing to the cashier, she held it and looked at me with a look of boredom, saying, “horseradish?”  I had hoped she was wrong, because I thought that horseradish was far too normal for my experiment.  I pulled out my phone and showed her the sign it had been labelled with, but she said that no, she thought it was actually horseradish because taro was white.  I shrugged and told her sure, silently vowing to go home and look up photos because maybe she was wrong, although I’m sure that that cashiers at those places are so well informed that they should actually be allowed to go straight into a Master’s in Botany without an undergrad degree.  

Anyway, I’ve returned to the store once since I picked the thing up, and have noticed that many mysterious foods seem to be missing labels or are piled up alongside one another so that it can be difficult to tell what you’re actually buying if you don’t know what you’re doing.  Wish me luck in future.  The second time I went back the taro sign had moved (this was actually when I took the photo above, having deleted the first one when I found out it probably wasn’t taro) and the roots looked more round, which made me think that the cashier had been right, as if there was any doubt.

When I  got home I googled taro and saw that the roots did indeed look more round than mine.  It also said that if you didn’t soak taro roots overnight before eating them, and if you ate them raw, they were toxic.  Let’s hope the cashier really did know what she was doing, because if my mystery veggie was horseradish I wouldn’t be soaking it and would be eating it raw.  Oh well, my husband would be the only one eating it anyway.

Now although I was disappointed that I had inadvertently picked up horseradish for several reasons – it’s a boring, well-known food, and also as mentioned I’m not a fan, preferring to enjoy my expensive cuts of beef straight up – my husband was overjoyed, because although he’s mostly indifferent to what he’s eating, he really enjoys horseradish that burns your tastebuds off and melts the hair out of your nose.  He sometimes pays for an expensive dinner at his favourite cheesy steakhouse, “La Castille,” in Mississauga, specifically for this privilege.   So I made horseradish from scratch for the first time using the information on this page, which took less than five minutes, and I made him the happiest guy ever.  Plus, making horseradish was really cool.

The reason why making horseradish is cool is because you have complete control over the results by manipulating a three-minute window of time.  I’ll explain.  When you cut or crush it, damaging the cells of the plant, enzymes go to work in a chemical reaction releasing mustard oil.  The root immediately goes from an unassuming tuber to a stinky, eye watering concoction when you mince the peeled, cubed root in your food processor, as I did.  If you don’t add vinegar within a short period of time to stop the reaction, the root darkens, becomes bitter, and loses pungency.  If you add vinegar immediately after processing (2-3Tbsp per cup) the horseradish is fairly mild, but if you let it sit for 3 minutes or so, the horseradish gets progressively hotter, which is the way my husband likes it.  The whole thing takes very little work to get exactly the results you want, which is rare in food prep, if you ask me.

My husband loved the horseradish.  He slathered it all over his steak and coughed a few times until he nearly choked, but apparently that was a good thing.  He excitedly said things like, “we could bottle the rest, horseradish keeps forever!” which isn’t true, one website said a few weeks in the fridge, but I liked his enthusiasm.  He did jump up from his chair and put away the rest of what was in the food processor, overjoyed when he remembered he has a boys’ weekend in only a few days and my horseradish might be that certain something that would give their prime rib night legendary status.

I’ll make it again and again. 

Rating:  3.5 Yums (if you’re a fan of horseradish)

PS – I started out by looking for a more interesting recipe incorporating horseradish on epicurious.com, but was surprised to find that almost all recipes suggested using prepared horseradish as an ingredient rather than making it from scratch.  Pourquoi?