Hankering for Indian Food

I love baking, and I love bread.  And it's quite possible that I could live on bread, cheese, wine, and whatever fruit happened to be in season for the rest of my life.  But, when it comes time to eat actual dinner and (gasp!) vegetables, I prefer the flavorful and exotic.  At the moment, after reading a few books set in India, I am obsessed with the idea of the delicious, easy Indian meal.  So far, I haven't found it, except at the amazing Bombay Cricket Club in southeast Portland.  But trying to cook decent Indian food in my kitchen - especially trying to cook India food without spending the whole day in the kitchen - is a lot harder than I expected.

My recipe for dal is hit-or-miss and kind of bland.  Its saving grace is that it only requires about six ingredients, all of which are found in most kitchen cabinets, and that it keeps well and tastes better with age.  It's a fast and easy recipe if your taste buds don't mind being a little big bored the first two days.  I boil red lentils with onions, garlic, turmeric, cumin, and ginger, and I saute another batch of onions and garlic, then I mix them together and add salt and pepper.  If I happen to have cilantro, I garnish with that, which adds some needed flavor. 

Some of my other forays into making Indian food have been more successful, but also much more time-consuming.  Last week, I invited a few friends over for dinner, planning to make a curry dish with paneer and peas.  I had read in Indian Vegetarian Cooking that making my own paneer was an easy and more authentic alternative to buying expensive paneer in the store.  I'm not sure why I, who have never been to India or eaten anything I could be sure was "authentic" Indian cuisine, was so excited about authentic paneer, but do I have a well-documented preference for doing things the hard way.  Making homemade paneer was: really fun, messy, somewhat frustrating, and not as productive as I expected.  Somehow, I thought that five cups of milk would get me more than a flattish block of cheese about the size of a Polaroid.  All told, it took about 45 minutes to boil down, curdle, and strain the milk to get the thick, ricotta-like substance that would become the cheese, then three hours pressing the cheese under a flat board for it to firm up.  It eventually reached a consistency somewhere between medium and firm tofu.  Once I had doused it in flour and pan fried it in ghee, it was firmer and added a delicious creaminess to the curry.  I used this curry recipe from Epicurious.com and completely loved it.  Four of us polished off the six servings, plus rice, dal, and naan, in record time.