Miss Masala and monsoon diary recipes

Really I should have done this in my last post, but I was kinda harassed with life going on around me and demanding that I join in.

Instead of me recreating the recipes for you I thought I'd send you over to the lovely Miss Masalas website instead for her recipes.

Here's the link for the keema mattar or mince with peas that I cooked. It's honestly a great dish, if you've got some mince in the house and like me you always have frozen peas handy, you couldn't ask for a more convinient dish which is a lot more impressive than spag bol yet again. Other than some of the spices you should always be able to find the ingredients in a local shop.

The other dish I cooked to go with this was the lovely mattar paneer, I love paneer cheese and feel that not enough Indian restaurants have it on the menu. Or maybe that's just in Norwich?

Luckily having good Indian supermarkets near by makes it very easy to get hold of. It reminds me of halloumi for the sole fact that you can fry it without it breaking down into a glorious melted cheese mess. Don't try to use the two interchangeably though, halloumi is far to salty!

I once made paneer at home, and its surprisingly easy. I can't remember where I got the recipe from but I remember not following the quantities as I would have had more cheese than I could eat. All you need to do is bring some full fat milk (about a pint i think) to a slow boil and then add about a tablespoon of lemon juice. The milk will then split into curds and whey, look disgusting, make you feel bad about the milk being ruined and also make you question you sanity and judgement.

This is meant to happen, and you then drain off the whey, your meant to line a colander with muslin, but I only had a clean tea towel to hand to collect the curd.

Squeeze them together and also try to push anymore whey out of your mixture. Then give it a few more washes and get any excess water out each time.

Then all you have to do is put the cheese still in a cloth on a chopping board and put something very heavy on top. Leave for a few hours and then you'll lift up the board and be amazed to see the paneer looking like it should.

As I said before I only tried this once, so please don't just follow my vague description here, google it and I'm sure you'll find some good recipes. It really is easy though.

This by the way is my fave recipe from the book so far.

here is the last one a chicken jhalfrezi this is a stupidly healthy and easy to cook version. Nothing else to say about it, just go try it.

The only recipe I cooked from Monsoon Diary was a vegetable stew, I don't feel like I want to put the recipe here as I wasn't particularly enamored with it and I doubt I'll ever cook it again unlike the recipes above.

All it was was some vegetables cooked with some chilli's, garlic, ginger and some coconut milk. I'll find something better for you some other time.

This is not to say that some of the other recipes didn't look amazing, just the best looked rather time consuming. The book is going to remain on my bookshelf as I did love it, just not that one recipe.

Hope you enjoyed this post and I'll have some more for you soon.