Flashback Wednesday: "Super Easy Homemade Paneer"

[This entry about making Indian cheese from scratch is from my LiveJournal weblog, dated June 24, 2009. I am including it here because next week, I will be writing about some of my favorite Indian vegetarian dishes, including Palak Paneer.]

A hands-down favorite dish from my childhood is Palak Paneer, a slow-cooked spinach (palak) curry with chunks of fresh homemade cheese (paneer). Back in the mid-1970s, when I was still in high school and my family and I were living on the edge of an Illinois cornfield, far from any Asian groceries or restaurants, I found a recipe for Palak Paneer in an Asian cookbook from the public library.

As with every other recipe I've tried since then, the curried spinach part of the dish turned out great, but the homemade cheese part was just too much trouble for too little result. For every half gallon of milk, I would get barely a cup of cheese (usually less), not enough, really, for a single batch of the curry for four to six people. Often, I would omit the cheese completely. Other times, I'd substitute small chunks of mozzarella cheese, which is a tasty India-meets-Italy fusion, but not authentic.

However, I recently stumbled upon a recipe for paneer that is much more satisfying in the effort-versus-results department. Oddly enough, although there is a bit more lemon juice in this recipe compared to the other recipes, the main difference is not the ingredients but the method. Rather than turning off the heat as soon as you've added the lemon juice, this method has you bring the mixture to a boil again after adding the lemon, then boiling it another few minutes before turning the heat off. The resulting curds are chunky and plentiful.

[This babble continues...]

Mayonnaise Snobbery

I didn't realize that I was a mayonnaise snob until I moved to The Netherlands. In 1994, about a week into our three-year stint, my family and I went to a small grocery store in our new neighborhood to purchase cold cuts and condiments.

It was June, one of the hottest Junes on record. It was so hot, in fact, that Dutch cows started leaving grassy pastures and climbing into canals to cool off. It made the national news. What a sight! I had no intention of turning on a flame or oven at the house, so here we were, looking for something tasty to make into sandwiches.

Mise en place: mustard, oil, lemon, eggs, salt.

When I stepped into one of the grocery's aisles to look for mayonnaise, my jaw dropped. The entire aisle was jam-packed with every kind of mayonnaise and mayonnaise-like food imaginable...plus some. Knowing almost no Dutch at that point in time, there was no way I could read the ingredients lists, so I decided instead to simply choose the stuff that was neither the highest nor the lowest priced, and hope for the best.

[This babble continues....]

DIY Crème Fraiche

With the bounty of rabbits in my freezer, I’ve been researching tasty ways to serve them up. One preparation came immediately to mind, something I have not had in over 30 years, Lapin à la moutarde.

The number of variations on rabbit in mustard sauce are simply astounding. Some recipes call for white wine, but many do not. Others use boneless rabbit meat, while many recipes keep things rustic, using whole rabbit pieces, bone in. Some cooks use roux and cream to thicken the sauce, others count on sour cream or crème fraiche. A number of recipes don’t bother to thicken the sauce at all, preferring a lighter (and, no doubt, healthier) approach.

Only three components were in common to all the recipes I read, and they were: 1) rabbit, 2) mustard (universally of the Dijon variety, often grainy Dijon), and 3) some kind of dairy product.

[This babble continues....]