Saag Paneer & Laacha Paratha
I know, I know, I know I made this on like Sunday and it’s already Florpsday this week I’m so fucking behind I’m an ass.
Get it?
Behind?
Ass?
LOL.
What can I say it’s been a really busy work at week. Week at work. Whatever. It’s been so busy I’ve been punting on making meals which means that post I made about meals this week is utter fucking bullshit. That wedge salad & grilled swordfish left over Roast Beef was fucking awesome. I did make the chili, but it wasn’t nearly what I said it was going to be, so you’ll have to get caught up on that later. This means there’s a few things going in the freezer, a few things being eaten at lunch (not as part of the meal they were intended) and like we had fucking pizza from the pizzeria tonight.
Wait. Is this becoming one of those food blogs where I spend 99% of the time meandering my way though bullshit memories. Fuck no. Mostly because I never give you recipes at the end of my bullshit stories, so like, I guess I’m worse? Anyway, I made some Saag Paneer on Sunday night along with some Laacha Paratha. I’d honeslty never heard of that ever before, but when I was menu planning I was gonna make roti and I was watching the Binging with Babish episode on indian breads and taking notes on what they were doing with roti but was way more intrigued by the third bread they made called Laacha Paratha what with it’s scallion pancake-esque flaky layers with ghee and all cooked so it was spotted and browned like a good pizza crust.
The bread was super simple, watch the video for technique, but like it’s a quantity of whole wheat flour, a smaller quantity of water and then some oil and you make a supple dough. Roll it thin, slather it with some ghee, and then accordion fold it, slap it around, coil it and roll it back out. I did not measure a goddamn thing when I made this. I then cooked it at high heat on a flat cast iron griddle until they looked done.
The main dish though was some Saag Paneer which is my favorite Indian dish ever except for maybe masala dosa but I can’t find a place in Seattle that serves those. I think I said in the menu planning that it would be a mix of the Cook’s Illustrated and the NY Times versions. Having made both I didn’t like either of them by themselves, but figured I could frankenstein that motherfucker. It ended up being 2 bags of spinach (my local store doesn’t sell “mature” spinach so I had to settle for some sass-talkin’, room-not-cleaning, parent ignoring adolescent spinach), and instead of the mustard greens from the Cook’s version, which I found to MUCH too assertive, I used a bunch of collard greens to add some depth.
I grated a bit of ginger and garlic (like a 1/2” finger of ginger and idk, 8 cloves of garlic?), and diced up two serrano chilis and a whole onion. The spices were black cardamom, coriander, cumin, yellow mustard and a touch of caraway seeds, and some ground kashmiri chili and smoked paprika. After browning the paneer (FYI that shit was store bought. WHO THE FUCK IS MAKING CHEESE JUST FOR DINNER? That would be the kind of asshole that would probably make a blog about cooking and never give a goddamn recipe), I added the onion, got it brownish, then the garlic, serrano & ginger, and then the spices so they could cook in the fat. Then I started adding spinach. At first you’re gonna be all “this will never fit” (lol), but surely it’ll start to break down and you’ll eventually get it all in the pot. I added a touch of water to keep it all from burning on the bottom. At this point I realized I forgot to make rice so I threw some in a pot with a knuckle of water (it’ll explain that sometime) and got that started so it would be done opefully by dinner.
While I was contemplating if I had maybe used too much spinach, I threw a handful of cashews, a cup-ish of buttermilk and a good splash of heavy cream into the blender and made it smoother than Kenny G’s jazz. I then added this and the browned cheese back to the pot and cooked it down until it seemed thick enough to be called done. Thankfully this was like 15 minutes later and the rice and the pasta were both cooked too. No, we didn’t eat this with rice AND pasta. My little gremlins wouldn’t touch anything that looked even remotely like this with a ten foot pole so I let them have pasta because fuck it’s Sunday and I just can’t even.