Saag paneer and variants

I'm having a bit of a spinach binge at the moment, have been for the last couple of months. This post shows how I started making saag paneer (from a recipe), and I'll tell you the much easier way I figured out. It's so much easier that saag paneer, or some variant thereof, has become one of my quick and easy, whip up after work, every day dinners.

The recipes said steam spinach in a steamer over a pot of boiling water:

I have replaced this with wash spinach, put it in a bowl or jug and microwave for 6 minutes on high, turning it over with tongs half way through.

The recipe said blend together, or mash in a mortar and pestle, onion, ginger root, garlic, and green chili …

 … until it's a paste, before frying off in butter:

My adaptation is to grate the onion, ginger, chili and garlic directly into a buttery frypan using a very fine microplane grater.

Then both the recipe and I add powdered spices (cumin, mace, and I use a vegetable masala mix) to the frying onion etc:

The recipe says to put the squeezed, steamed spinach into the food processor …

… and whizz until it's a paste …

… before adding to the onions, spices etc in the frypan, along with some yoghurt and a little cream:

What I do is squeeze as much wetness out of the microwaved spinach as I can, then add the onions etc, the yoghurt, and a little cream (sometimes) to the spinach in the bowl I microwaved it in, then whizz the whole lot up with my stick blender. Making a collar-like arangement for the stick blender out of a paper towel stops it from decorating the kitchen with green splotches.

Then, return the spinach mix to your pan, add paneer …

… and heat through …

… before serving on rice:

This spinach sauce, although traditionally eaten with paneer, is also delicious with lightly steamed cauliflower and/or cooked carrot chunks. Actually, I think it would be delicious with just about anything, but carrots and cauliflower are low calorie and have some bulk so that's what I eat it with.

Recipe

Saag Paneer

Ingredients:
Paneer
2 litres milk
half a cup yoghurt
half a cup white wine vinegar or lemon juice
some muslin and a colander

or you can buy paneer (panir) instead of making it.

Saag
a big bunch of spinach - 500 grams or so I think my bunches are
an onion
a big clove of garlic
1 green chili about 3 inches long
about an inch of ginger root
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground mace
1 heaped teaspoon vegetable masala or garam masala
a cup of yoghurt
half a cup of cream (optional)
salt

Method:
Paneer
Put milk into a pot and bring almost to the boil. Turn off heat. Add yoghurt, then half the vinegar/lemon juice and stir well with a wooden spoon. You should end up with white curds in a greenish whey. If the whey is still white, add more vinegar/lemon, until all the whiteness has curdled out.
Pour the curds into a muslin lined colander and leave them to drain. I hurry this process up by wrapping them up in the muslin and putting a heavy object on top to squeeze out the whey, but you're supposed to leave it for a couple of hours.
The hotter you cook the milk, the less likely the curds will be to melt later on when they're in the curry. I like them a bit melty, so I don't take it quite to boiling. If the milk boils, the curds will be completely melt-proof.

Saag
Wash the spinach and remove any roots and thick stalks. Put the spinach into a microwave proof bowl (I use a 2 litre pyrex measuring jug) and nuke on high for 6 minutes, turning it all over half way through with tongs to make sure it all gets cooked through.
While the spinach is in the microwave, melt a couple of teaspoons of butter (more or less) in a pan, and grate the chili and the peeled onion, garlic and ginger into the butter using a fine microplane (or similar) grater. If the chili is not crisp enough to grate, chop it finely. It's going to be blended later so you don't need to be too worried.
Stir around and cook at a high enough temperature that it sizzles but doesn't burn. Cook until it's translucent - or would be if the bits were big enough to see.
Add the spices to the pan and cook until fragrant.
Squeeze the cooked spinach against the side of the cooking bowl with tongs and tip out as much liquid as you can.
Tip the onion/spice mix into the spinach, making sure you get all of the bits of chili if it was chopped.
Add the yoghurt and cream to the spinach. Put your stick blender into the bowl. Get a paper towel and rip it half way through the centre. Wrap this "collar" around the stick of your blender, arranging it to cover the bowl and catch splatters.
Blend like crazy, holding the collar around the stick, until the spinach is a homogeneous sauce.
Pour the spinach mix back into its pan, heat it back up and add salt to taste.
Add the drained (or squashed) paneer that has been cut into approximately 1 inch (2.5 cm) chunks and heat through.
Serve with rice.

Serves three or four as a main.

The paneer can be replaced with any chunky cooked vegetable, or cooked chicken.

Earthquake relief

The aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake is basically a lot of mess to clean up. There are massive amounts of rubble in the CBD, with far too many bodies buried underneath, that needs to be cleared away by expert crews. But this is actually by far the least of the mess. Not very many people actually live in the CBD, most people live in grassy suburban areas, many of which have suffered badly from liquefaction - where the ground liquefies and silt bubbles up through it leaving mounds of sludge, much of it contaminated from broken sewers, in people's gardens and houses. Not a few houses have sunk right into it. Imagine you are at the beach, below the high tide mark, and the tide is just going out. If you pat the wet but firm sand quickly it becomes liquefied and flows. That's what happened to a whole city.

Two separate groups of people have formed "Armies" to deal with the cleanup. There's the Farmy Army, a group of farmers from nearby districts who turned up with utes and wheelbarrows and shovels, then there's the Student Volunteer Army, the nucleus of which is almost the entire student body of Canterbury University. The students asked the students at Otago (the university where I work) if they could manage to provide 10,000 packed lunches, enough to keep the Canterbury students fed at lunchtime for a week. The students and staff and friends and families fell to with a will last Friday night, and delivered over 10,000 lunches to the Otago student union by 6pm the next day.

They requested things like muesli bars, tinned tuna, crackers, chocolate. All non-perishable items. I added little pottles of fruit and jelly, or boxes of dried fruit to mine. I also made some vegetarian versions with baked beans instead of tuna, and stuck a piece of cheese into each lunch.

This is my pile of lunch stuff:

Instead of buying muesli bars (I thought the shops might well run out if 10,000 were in demand) I made my own. They're what the English call "flapjack".

Large quantities of butter …

… with white and brown sugars …

… are melted together with some honey, golden syrup, or other flavoured syrup. I used what was left of a bottle of "Maple Flavoured Syrup":

Then you mix up quite a lot of rolled oats along with whatever dried fruit takes your fancy. I used chopped dried apricots, dessicated coconut, currants, and raisins.

You mix solid with melted ingredients, then press out into a tray and bake for 30-odd minutes at 190°C

My flapjack was made in three oven trays, and contained 1.5kg of rolled oats!

Three pieces went into each of my 27 packed lunches.

Apparently the students were getting very very sick of muesli bars by the end of the week! Better than being sick of being hungry though.

Recipe

Flapjack (Muesli Bar)

Ingredients
200g butter
160g sugar (brown, or brown and white mixed)
500g coarse oatmeal or oatmeal and rolled oats
1/2 cup honey or golden syrup
1 cup dessicated coconut
1 cup mixed dried fruit and/or nuts/and/or seeds

Method
Preheat oven to 190°C
Melt butter, sugar, and honey or syrup in a pot
Add mixed dry ingredients
Press into an oven tray and bake until browned all over
Mark into slices when slightly cooled, then when completely cold cut the slices apart.

Florentines

This year I'm going to my brother's place in Auckland for Christmas. We're doing Christmas day at his house, then we're packing up the kids and the dog and the boat and our parents' ashes, and going to Tarawera and Taupo for a holiday. While we're there we're going to tip Mum and Dad over the side of the boat into Lake Taupo. Mum always intended to do this with Dad's ashes, but didn't get around to it before the Alzheimer's struck, so we decided to save him up and do them both at once. Mum died this year, and Christmas seemed like a good time to do it.

I'm heading on up there late on Christmas Eve, so I thought I'd better do a bit of baking to contribute to the festivities. Stuff that keeps - I don't want to be fussing around in the kitchen the day I leave.

I've made this recipe before, and it's a goodie. It's in The Chocolate Cookbook, by Christine France.

You start off mixing 120ml of cream (I used milk, I didn't have any cream - it worked fine), 50g butter, 50g sugar and 30 ml honey …

… in a pot, and heat it, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

Then you bring it to the boil and add in 150g flaked almonds, 50g chopped candied peel, 75g chopped candied ginger …

40g flour, and 1/2 tsp ground ginger.

You mix it well …

… then drop teaspoonfuls onto a baking sheet, flattening them out as much as possible …

… and bake them in a 180°C oven until they're browned and bubbly but not burnt. About 10 minutes. If they're not cooked enough they'll be soft, but you can put them back in the oven if this happens.

I stirred some dried cranberries into half of my mixture:

Because things like cranberries don't soak up moisture, you can add extra bits and pieces within reason - the biscuit mix does have to cover everything to stick it all together.

Once the biscuits are baked and cool, you need to cover their backs with melted chocolate. I discovered the easiest way to do this is to put the chocolate in a plastic bag …

… then microwave it gently, taking it out and squishing it around often, until it's just melted. Then you can cut a small hole in the corner of the bag and pipe the chocolate onto the biscuit, using the bag to spread it around:

I used a lot less chocolate doing it this way than I have before, and the cleaning up is a breeze - just throw the bag away.

One tin of Florentines waiting to go into my bag:

Recipe

Florentines (from The Chocolate Cookbook)

Ingredients:
120ml cream (I used milk)
50g butter
50g granulated sugar
30ml honey
150g flaked almonds
40g plain flour
1/2 tsp ground ginger
50g diced candied peel
75g diced stem ginger
50g plain chocolate, chopped into small pieces (I omitted this)
150g bittersweet chocolate, chopped ditto
150g white chocolate, chopped ditto too. (I only used the dark stuff)

Method:
Preheat oven to 180°C, grease to large baking sheets (I used silicone mats)
Melt the butter, honey, and cream together over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved, then bring to the boil, stirring constantly.
Remove from the heat and stir in everything else except the bittersweet and white chocolate.
Drop teaspoons of the mixture onto the baking sheets a good distance apart. Spread each round as thinly as possible with the back of the spoon.
Bake for 8-10 minutes until the edges are golden brown and the biscuits are bubbling. They burn easily, so be careful. Bake all the biscuits in batches.
Allow the biscuits to cool on the baking sheet until they're firm enough to move. Cool completely on a wire rack.
Melt the bittersweet chocolate, and spread over the bottoms of half of the biscuits. Leave to set on a wire rack, chocolate side up.
Repeat with the white chocolate on the remaining biscuits.

Lemon Delicious

Or, in this case, Lemon/Lime Delicious. It's my birthday, and I'm going to have one of my favourite desserts for dinner. That's one of the good things about being old, you can have pudding for dinner if you want to.

The only thing wrong with this one is that it requires two bowls, I believe in minimising dishes where possible but it's not possible here. First, preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F.

Butter either one ovenproof dish or some ramekins. I'm making a half recipe and four ramekins is about right for that:

Beat the softened butter …

… add the castor sugar and beat again until light and fluffy …

… add grated citrus zest …

… and juice, and mix …

… then add flour and baking powder …

… the recipe says self raising flour, but I never have that …

… mix again, then add egg yolk and milk …

… and mix again. It always curdles, it's the lemon juice and milk and small amount of flour:

Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks …

… and fold into the rest of the batter:

 Distribute the mixture between the ramekins, or pour into the larger dish …

… than bake at  180°C until cooked. The little ramekins cook faster than a big dish will:

I think these were in for about 20 minutes. The tops spring back when you press them once they're cooked:

The mixture separates out into a super-light souflée-ish sponge on top of  a gorgeous lemony custard:

Best eaten with cream poured over - I used yoghurt, which is also good, but cream is perfect.

Recipe

Lemon (or other citrus) Delicious

(I made half this amount)

Ingredients:
220g castor sugar
125g butter
60g flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp grated citrus zest (at least half lemon)
4 tbsp citrus juice (at least half lemon)
2 eggs, separated
1250ml milk

Method:
Cream butter and sugar. Mix in flour, citrus zest and juice
Mix egg yolks and milk into the batter
Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks, then fold into the batter
Spoon into greased dish(es), then put them into a bain marie with boiling water coming half way up the sides of the dish(es).
Bake at 180°C until done. Probably about 20 minutes for individual dishes, or 45 minutes for one big one.
Serves 6.