Palak Paneer (Spinach Cottage-cheese curry)

Palak Paneer is a signature North Indian dish. It is one of the simplest vegetarian dishes to prepare as well healthiest. Although it may be little high in calories since it has Paneer (Cottage cheese) and butter, but still it is one of the best dishes you can server to your kids and prepare quickly especially while serving your guests with a delicious dinner.

The dish is simply called "Palak Paneer". Palak refers to spinach and Paneer refers to Cottage-Cheese. Cottage-Cheese is nothing but cheese which is freshly prepared. Traditionally people do prepare cottage-cheese at home. But these days you get this readily available in shops and especially in Indian stores.

Ingredients:
Spinach  - 1 large bunch (as shown below)
Cottage cheese (Paneer)  -  150 grams
Red Bell Pepper -  1 (optional for garnish)
Turmeric   -   1/2 Tsp
Green Chillies  -   2-3

Salt to taste
Cumin powder  -  1 Tbs
Garam Masala (Indian multi-spice powder)  -  2 Tsp
Vegetable Oil for cooking
Onion  -  1 small/medium
Garlic  -  3-4 cloves
Lemon Juice - 1 tsp
Fresh cream - 3-4 tbs

For tempering:
Butter (or clarified butter a.k.a Ghee)
Dry red-chillies  - 2
Red Chilli powder -  1/2 tsp

Step 1: Preparing the spinach soup:
In a large soup pan grab the washed spinach (remove the roots, dead leaves if any before that). Add couple of cups of water as shown and add 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

Note: The salt you add now is just for cooking spinach and enhance its flavour profile. So you may need to add some more salt to taste during the completion of the dish in later stages.

Stir occasionally the contents till spinach blends into the water and get cooked. Spinach is very delicate, so it needs just 10-12 minutes depending on the quantity you are making and the flame you set while cooking the same.

After 6-8 minutes as you can see below, it is cooked partially.

After 10-12 minutes you can see below, it is cooked fully. Once Spinach gets cooked you should able to see it will remain submerged in the water unlike uncooked one.

 
Once it is cooled, you can blend this in a blender. Once it is done you should get in a consistency of a pan-cake batter or something like a thick soup as shown below.

Prepare Onion-Garlic paste:
Shallow fry finely chopped onion and garlic (with skin) on a open pan with few drops of cooking oil.

Once it turns golden brown, you can let it to cool for a while and make into a thick paste as shown.

Grill or shallow-fry Paneer (Cottage-cheese):
On a flat pan add some butter, and add your diced cottage-cheese and shallow-fry gently as shown.

Note: Optionally if you can grill instead shallow-fry, you can grill this too.

Note: Cottage-cheese contains water unlike a regular cheese. So when you grill or shallow-fry, make sure you do not stir excessively. This may result breaking apart into small chunks. So make sure if you are done with cooking one side, gently flip them to the other side as shown.

As you can see on one side it is cooked, then gently it is flipped over. Ignore the ones which look more cooked vs the ones while looks under-cooked. Sometimes  people add cottage-cheese as it is (i.e without frying/grilling), but adding after frying/grilling into the dish makes it more yummy.

Preparing the final dish:
In a wok add the garlic-onion paste, and chopped green chillies along with oil as shown.

Fry this for couple of minutes so that the garlic-onion paste turns red in colour and blends with the green chillies.

Now add the Spinach soup (Palak) into the same and bring it to a gentle boil in a low or medium flame. Stir the same occasionally so that it won't burn or stick to the bottom or sides of the pan.

Add turmeric, cumin powder and garam masala powder (Indian all spice powder) and cook the contents. Finally add salt to taste.

Once Spinach soup is fully cooked, add the paneer cubes (cottage cheese) into the same as shown. Now turn the flame to low and cook this for a minute. And turn off the flame.

Optionally you can shallow-fry or grill your red bell peppers as shown and add it to your dish.

You can add these bell-pepper pieces into the final dish.

Note: Never overcook the bell-peppers, it should not become too soft. Instead it should remain crisp and crunchy to bite.

Tempering:
For tempering melt some butter, and add dried red chillies. Once the red chilles  are fried turn off the flame. Add red-chilli powder (paprika powder) give it a stir so that it looses its extra spiciness and instead retains the flavour and this flavour gets infused into the butter. The red-chilli powder also adds natural colour to the butter.

Now add the tempering onto your dish as shown.

Piping hot and tasty Palak paneer dish is ready to be served with your choice of bread. Tastes great with all variants of Indian flat bread such as Rotis, Kulchas, Naan, Kerala Parotas, etc. In addition to it, it also goes well with French loaf, toasted bread or just any choice of your bread with an Indian twist.

Note: Optionally you can add fresh cream on top of the dish. It adds a nice contrast white colour on a green dish as well a smooth flavour!

Hope you guys enjoyed this recipe. Please do post your comments and suggestions.