Palak Paneer Kofta

The first time I went to India in 1998, I fell deeply in love with the food. As a vegetarian at the time, I delighted in the lengthy menus with a small 'non-veg' section at the back, and couldn't get enough of all things palak (spinach). Two particular favourites were palak paneer and alu palak.

In the middle of our month's travel through the north, we found ourselves stuck in Agra for an unexpected extra night (due to thick fog and a malfunctioning ILS at the Agra airport). Exhausted from long bus rides, insouciant touts, and endless transport delays, we splurged and stayed the night at a family-run guest house near the airport called New Bakshi House (and it really was a splurge at $42 for the two of us, including breakfast and a hot shower, when we were used to paying around $10 a night). The main treat at Bakshi House, however, was not the comfortable beds or hot water, nor even the delicious home style food, but the lovely hostess, Rani, who shared her recipes with me. As I banged on about my love of palak and paneer, Rani assured me this Indian cheese was very simple to make, and gave me her recipe, as well as others for kuku, alu palak, malai kofta, ghobi, yoghurt, and another I wrote down as 'a Chinese dish'. Although she was adamant that paneer was very simple to make, I perhaps simply wasn't a confident enough cook yet to believe her. It in fact took me nearly a decade before I attempted to make my own. Here is Rani's recipe:

Paneer

Boil 1 litre half & half (her sister-in-law Tina had lived in America for 17 years, so perhaps she introduced the half & half idea?). Add 2 tspn lemon juice. As soon as milk curdles, remove from heat. Put cheesecloth in sieve. Pour milk mixture through & cover lightly. Leave 1 ½ hours or more (you may rinse the curd at this stage if you've added too much lemon juice).

I think that for many years I simply didn't trust the simplicity of this operation. Surely the paneer wouldn't form? Trust me, it does every time, just like that. I now use ordinary full cream milk, and for a family of five I find I need to do about 3L to make enough paneer for a meal (it makes about 500g). I also usually press mine as it rests in the sieve, unless I'm making paneer koftas, since I'll be crumbling the paneer anyway. I also save the whey, which you can use if you're making chapatis or parathas. If not, as per @crazybrave's suggestion recently, I simply add it to the chook scraps.

Here's what I did with my most recent paneer, which I will usually make before lunch if I want it for dinner. This recipe is adapted from my favourite Indian cookbook, bought in Calcutta, “Desi Khana: The Best of Indian Vegetarian Cooking” by Tarla Dalal.

Palak Paneer Kofta

Koftas: for 500g paneer, I add about 4T plain flour, chopped coriander to taste (loads!), chopped chilies to taste, pinch of bi-carb soda and salt to taste. Form into balls and deep fry until golden brown. Rest on paper towels.

Paste: bash up loads of garlic, pistachios, poppy seeds (not too many as they're bitter), ginger & chili (if no children will share this meal) – all to taste, which means lots of garlic especially in our house. Tarla adds grated coconut, but when I was short of any, I actually used coconut cream & just add it after the other ingredients fried for a bit. She also uses cashews, which would be equally delicious I'm sure!

Chop up a giant bunch of spinach and cook it lightly with about ½ cup of water until it's fully wilted. Blend the spinach to a puree and set aside.

Heat ghee in a cast iron frypan and cook the paste for 3-5 minutes, until the garlic loses its acerbity. Add a couple of tablespoons of coconut cream and cook for another minute or two. Add about a cup of full cream natural yoghurt and cook on lower heat for another minute or so. Add the spinach puree, 1T raw sugar or jaggery, salt to taste and cook for another 3 to 4 minutes. Add the koftas to heat back through and serve. :-)

My kids adore this dish, as do adults. You can serve it with rice and naan or pappadums. If you make it spicy, it's worth serving a raita as well. As for the paneer, it's also delicious simply on its own – I have to hide it from the kids while I'm cooking or there's never enough...

The Great Pho Party '09

So I'm back. Hopefully this blog will come alive again now that I'm back to focusing on food and identity full time in my PhD (after a manic year off as a worker). But on to the real story...

Last weekend, to celebrate receiving a scholarship for the rest of my PhD (yay!!), I invited about 20 of my friends and family who have been through the first couple years of my part-time student/mother/worker struggles with unfunded study. Most are fellow students, all are lovely, and most also really like pho (Vietnamese noodle soup). (N.B. I know I should use diacritics, but am too lazy to go copy them and paste them here, so indulge me.) I had never made pho before, though in a cooking class in Saigon I was shown the basic method for pho bo (beef pho). As the grateful recipient of a lovely big 15L stainless steel pot for last summer solstice, what better way to use it than to make pho for loads of people? Well, you'll see that my lovely pot wasn't as big as it seemed...

Friday morning, Stuart and I wandered dreamily through Minh Phat (Vietnamese grocery off Victoria St, Richmond) gathering crucial ingredients, then over to a fruit shop for a few missing herbs (esp. sawtooth coriander) and finally the butcher for the meat and bones. I first asked for 4kg of shin bones and was told they didn't have any. Weird, huh? I accepted this bizarre response and asked for 4kg of flank, which I got (and realised was A LOT of meat!). I then asked for 1.5kg of topside, whereupon the woman serving me lfinally ooked quizzically at me so that I said, "I'm making pho". She appeared quite excited about this and thrust a bag of beef balls at me, insisting I needed them too. Sure, why not? Finally, she asked me to wait, rushed out back and dragged a huge bag of bones in, pulling four out and telling me, "for you, no charge today." I was delighted (and she clearly was too - I guess not many Anglos pop in to get ingredients for serious quantities of pho - and I think she must originally have thought I wanted their bones for a dog?), thanked her graciously, paid for the rest (only $47 for all that!) and then Stuart and I lugged our 10kg of meaty goodness back to the car and rushed home.

Dearie me, I wish I'd started the stock earlier, but I think I had extra bone, which made up for a slightly too short cooking time... so now it's 11:30am, guests will arrive at 7pm, and this stock wants a minimum of 6 hours...

Method & Ingredients

Remember, I was cooking for 20 (and ended up serving 25, with plenty of ingredients except the rice noodles, which ran out for the last 5 of us, but I had some dried to make up the shortfall).

4kg shin bones
4kg flank, cut into pieces about 15cm long
1.5kg topside, sliced thinly
4-5 brown onions
8-12 shallots
2-3 bulbs ginger
6 cinnamon sticks
12 star anise
4 brown cardamom pods
6 cloves
1/2C salt
1/2C sugar
1/2C fish sauce (buy a good brand, which should say "Nuoc Mam Nhi" - any from Phu Quoc are great)
4kg fresh rice noodles
spring onions, finely sliced
sawtooth coriander
coriander
bean sprouts
Vietnamese basil
chilies, sliced
lemons, quartered
chili paste
hoisin
nuoc mam cham (dipping fish sauce: fish sauce, lemon, garlic, chili, sugar)

First, take your bones and soak them in warm water with lemon juice and a generous pinch of salt for about 1/2 hour. This starts to release the blood so you will get a clear stock. Then pop them into boiling water for a further 5-10 minutes, before transferring them to your stockpot full of boiling water. I put them into my 15L pot and simmered them there for about 3 hours, skimming the scum off the top frequently.

While the bones are simmering, lightly bash the cinammon, cloves, star anise and cardamom to break them into smaller pieces, then dry roast them for a few minutes in a (preferably cast iron) frypan (to release more of their oils before adding them to the stock). Put the spices into a muslin bag and drop into the stock.

Next, hold the onions, shallots and ginger over an open flame until chargrilled and set aside to cool. When cool, pull and rub the blackened skins off, cut the onions in half, and pop all of it into a muslin bag. Add these to the stock after about 2 hours.

Next, you're going to add the flank to cook for 2-3 hours. This is when I realised I needed the bigger pot. Stuart dragged his brewing pot out for me, which is about 40L - it takes up 2 burners but does the trick. :-) Add the salt, sugar and fish sauce now. After 2-3 hours, pull the flank back out, pop it into a baking dish with some of the stock and leave to cool.

Once the stock has been simmering for about 6 hours (you can definitely go longer - this is a minimum), pull the bones and muslin bags out and strain it through a piece of muslin into a clean pot. (I was able to put it back into the 15L pot at this stage - and I had added some water when I went into the big pot.) Did I mention that it's very very helpful to have a second person around when you're making this much pho? Stuart was very helpful and appreciated!

Your stock is ready! The flank should have cooled, now you can cut it into bite-sized pieces (and I removed a lot of fat whilst doing this - very happy chooks Saturday morning!). Taste the stock and adjust seasonings if you need to with salt, sugar or fish sauce. It's also common in Vietnam to adjust with msg or 'pork powder' or 'chicken powder', which are msg-free stock powders (Knorr is a favoured brand in Saigon). I was very happy that I had no need to add any.

As guests are ready to serve, have your flank in one bowl, the topside in another, a pot of boiling water next to the stock, and your rice noodles ready to go, as well as your array of plates of herbs, lemon, bean sprouts, fresh chilies, and chili paste and hoisin. I used Stuart's brewing sieve to dip the noodles into the boiling water to heat and soften them before placing them into a bowl. Next, I added the raw sliced topside, then boiling stock, then flank pieces before handing the bowl to the grateful recipient to add their own herbs, etc. Voila!

My favourite comment of the evening may have been, "I'd pay $8.50 for this" from a Vietnamese Australian friend, though I did also appreciate, "it tastes just like real pho in Saigon", even though much of my theoretical work thus far has been contesting notions of authenticity and its instability as a category, let alone its essentialising tendencies... I guess the point is that we all agreed it was rather delish.

I think next time, though, I might cook it for just 10 people!