mt. marcy

Indian food is my favorite ethnic dish but the closest restaurant is an hour away in Rochester, MN. Thank you Mayo Clinic for bringing ethnic food to southern Minnesota! So Caylan and I decided to make it ourselves. For the main course, we made palak paneer, a cheese and creamy spinach dish.

We made the paneer/cheese from scratch. That consisted of boiling milk, adding lemon juice, separating the curds, straining the whey, kneading, resting for two hours, slicing, and cooking. Whew!
The palak/creamy spinach was easy. It consisted of cooking spinach and cream with a gazillion spices (cardamom, garam masala, cloves, cinnamon, cumin, coriander, turmeric, green chilies, ginger, and garlic).

We opted to buy frozen naan instead of making it ourselves since Caylan believes naan only tastes good if made with a tandoori oven. A tandoori oven is a cylindrical clay oven that gets very hot.

Flash back to the first time Caylan and I met. I went to the food coop in Grand Forks, Amazing Grains, to get ghee for making naan. Caylan was the co-op's baker and he gave me the co-op's recipe. I went home, made naan on a griddle, and the next day brought him some of the naan. He thought it was mediocre. Flash forward to last night's dinner. As we were eating our store bought frozen naan, I commented that I thought the naan I brought him at Amazing Grains was better than this. He admitted that if he had known he would be spending the rest of his life with me he would not have said that the naan was "just okay."

For dessert we made gajar hawa, indian carrot pudding. If I had read the recipe before starting to make it I would have known that it needed to simmer for an hour and sit for 3 hours. Fortunately, we were hungry again by the time it was ready.