Paneer is an ingredient common across South Asian cuisine. It has, for instance, played a role in Indian cuisine – notably North Indian – for centuries, despite Indian food being particularly prone to development and change. Mutter Paneer, paneer with peas, is perhaps the best known of all these dishes – especially in the West – and since it’s such a quintessentially Indian ingredient, it seemed offensive to ignore paneer any longer!
Fear not, it is perfectly clear to me that Mexican food isn’t composed entirely of a long string of dips and side dishes, such as guacamole and refried beans. Indeed, how strange it would be to have a nation of perennial nibblers living among us. So, safe in the knowledge that there exists, on this planet, no colony of human sized rodents in possession of an immoral number of carrot sticks, I embarked upon the first “proper” dish of the ‘Frugal Does Mexican’ series.
One of the main advantages that accompany a cast-iron pan is its innate ability to be tossed willy-nilly into an oven without incurring considerable damage. Without such an implement one has to, when making a frittata or something similar, go through an occasionally embarrassing egg-flipping process. As such, it is clear that once one has received such a useful gift one is obliged to put it through its frittata-making paces. This must seem like incredibly old, and thus ironic, news to the skillet veterans out there. However, for a novice, such as me, it is proving emotionally difficult to come to terms with how rapidly such an item can become entirely indispensable.
I discovered a recipe a while ago, though I can’t remember from where, for a really simple bulgur wheat salad. The perfect opportunity to make it arose today when I realised I hadn’t soaked my split peas, with which I had intended to make a chana dahl. This dish really is incredibly simple, delicious, healthy and quick. It also contains bulgur wheat which is, at the moment, one of my favourite foods. Bulgur wheat is filling, healthy and very versatile, not to mention the fact it has a much better taste than couscous, its man-made equivalent.