Waste Not Want Not

Get ready to be impressed.

I am so impressed with myself and the other medics I'm living with on this placement. We did something amazing last night. We opened the fridge to find about 2 pints of sour full fat milk. We didn't bin it. Oh no. We made paneer.

Paneer is a cheese used in indian cooking which is lovely.

To make the paneer we took the soured milk and heated it to just below boiling. We then added lemon juice by the tablespoon to curdle it until it had fully separated into the lumpy curd and the greeny-white runny whey. Then we strained it, rinsed it a bit, strained it some more, squeezed all of the water out (ideally this would have been in a cheese cloth but we used a clean blue jay cloth), then we put it in the fridge in kind of a flat patty shape.

Today we made mutter paneer. A cheese and pea curry.

To make this we cubed the paneer (about 1cm x 1cm) and shallow fried it in vegetable oil. We then took that out and cooked 2 finely chopped onions until they were golden in the oil. After this we added a homemade paste of garlic, ginger and corriander. Then some tomato passata. Then the cubes of paneer and lots of petis pois which we had defrosted. After this we put some tumeric, ground corriander and cumin, red chilli powder and garam masala to the sauce as well as a big pinch of salt. All this cooked and was totally amazing.

I can now impress everyone by being able to cook something authentically indian. I can't wait until I can impress my friends and family at home with something they'll never have tried before.

Lily xXx