Making paneer, a photo journey

The first time I considered making my own paneer I felt so daunted, but in reality making this homemade Indian cheese is super simple and fun.  All you need is milk, lemon, cheesecloth, and some boiling water.  

I learned to make paneer from this recipe (with video) from manjulaskitchen.com.  If you feel inspired, give it a try!  Otherwise just scroll and relax as you watch the process unfold in photos- from milk and lemon to cubed paneer ready to add to a palak paneer curry.  

Try freezing the tasty stuff

When it's time to clean out my produce drawer, there's always a bag of withered ginger, wrinkled thai chiles, and a few blackened curry leaves lurking shamefully at the bottom of the drawer.  Recently I've been experimenting with freezing small to medium batches of ingredients I know I'll be using in upcoming weeks for cooking Indian curries.

I've frozen a lot of things over the years- ice cream, ground espresso, leftover cookies, an overabundance of plums, veggie burgers (store bought and home made), the impossible-to-find curry leaves I used to order from ishopindian.com.  Whenever I freeze food it is either because I bought it already frozen, because I have too much of something and don't want it to go to waste, or because I need I need a way to preserve something precious.

I've long known that freezing curry leaves works surprisingly well.  Even now that I can walk to an Indian grocery, when I buy fresh curry leaves I use half fresh and freeze the rest, unwashed, directly in the plastic bag in which I bought them.  When it's time to use the frozen curry leaves they're so easy to pluck from the stem, rinse under water, and pat dry.  The process of rinsing them easily defrosts them, and the smell of curry leaves fills the kitchen the moment the leaves hit the hot oil.

This week I've frozen ginger root, turmeric root, garlic, and jalapeño.  I had read that frozen ginger could be easily grated using a microplane grater.  Sure enough, when I grated my teaspoon of frozen ginger using my trusty parmesan cheese grater, the ginger fell like powder into a neat little pile on my prep board.  And, as promised, I didn't have to peel it.  Although the process worked well, getting more than a teaspoon or two out of a small piece of ginger is just as time consuming as grating it fresh.  I've frozen some larger pieces to see if, with greater surface area, I can get a better bang for the buck on my time when I grate.  In the meantime, I keep a half cup of fresh ginger paste made in my Vitamix ready to go in the refrigerator.  It also makes great ginger tea!

I've  successfully used small pieces of frozen turmeric root and ginger root in smoothies.  I chop them into one inch pieces and dry them before freezing, so that I can easily add them in the Vitamix.  

This week I also started experimenting with freezing peeled garlic.  I never have any trouble keeping garlic fresh, this is purely a time saver, so as not to have to stop and peel a bunch of garlic while busily prepping the many ingredients used in starting an Indian curry dish.  I was shocked by how easily I could mince frozen garlic straight out of the freezer!  The first curry I made using frozen peeled garlic was received with rave reviews, my husband had no idea I'd done anything differently than usual.  Tomorrow I'm going to try introducing frozen garlic into a pesto sauce.

From nutrition and aesthetic standpoints, fresher is always better.  For those who only use ginger paste or curry leaves once or twice a week, freezing these potent flavor and aromatic powerhouses may equate to fresher food, and will certainly mean less waste.  And if having speedily prepped ginger and garlic means more home made weeknight meals, I say give it a try.  The worst that can happen is you decide you just can't give up fresh from the refrigerator instead of the freezer.

Using whole moong beans in sambar

This awesome recipe for Eggplant Tomato Sambhar is incredibly simple and so yummy!

This has been a favorite when I need to make something fast for lunch, and, as the recipe's author says, it's always finger-licking good.

Never one to leave a good thing as it is, I wanted to experiment and see if I could use whole moong beans (dal) in place of the split and hulled moong dal I normally use.

I pressure cooked the whole moong dal with a little extra water.  After it was done cooking, I added some more water to the dal and used the immersion blender to make a smooth purée.  To help along the illusion of smoothness, I used tomato purée in place of the whole tomatoes.  

The result was a smooth and addictively tasty sambar.

Black Cardamom Pods

My first encounter with black cardamom pods. The astringent smell knocked me off my feet before I even ground them!

I used the black cardamom together with other spices to create a spice blend for masala chai.  The recipe comes from a new cookbook in my collection: Vegan Indian Cooking. The smell of the spice blend definitely reminded my husband of the masala chai he enjoyed in Bangalore.  The chai, itself, was a good first try, but still a work in progress.