Cooking - Making a Matar Paneer

This week I made a resolution of preparing 10 Indian dishes. This is something I am doing as a challenge to myself to get into preparing tricky delicacies. I will mostly be working on Indian dishes since that is where I seem to have more grasp on. Besides, I am not really a fan of those dishes which take very little preparation time.

It's not bad about very less preparation, you can make them any time but it's just they do not offer enough challenge that I expect as I start this endeavor.

So let's start with the first dish that I prepared this week was "Mattar Paneer". (Pease and Paneer gravy). Thanks to an excellent chef from CookingShooking channel on Youtube, I was easily able to find and follow this awesome recipe. I put it for the weekend, but since I didn't have anything at my home yesterday, I decided to change plans and start making preparations for it instead.

Fortunately, I had almost all the ingredients I needed to get started on it. Although I had to run errands to the grocery market to buy extra onions and cilantro, that's about it.

It took me close to 75 minutes to fully prepare this dish. Frying and waiting to cool the gravy took most of the time. I usually parallelize cooking with cutting vegetables, so that didn't waste as much time as it would otherwise have. It's important to follow the directions the first time you cook it and not get too ahead of yourself. Also, keep tasting food as you go on preparing which will give you chance to add is there is something amiss to achieve the perfect taste.

Although be careful. There are certain ingredients which cannot be added properly after the dish is done. For example, you can easily add water, salt or sugar once the dish is done. But you can't add raw spices to it. The thing about spices is that you need to fry them carefully before they can be mixed. Lack of which can make your food raw tasting.

After everything else was done, the chef also advised adding a bit of curd, lemon juice, cilantro and ketchup on the top of it. Although their taste wasn't obvious, it made Mattar Paneer better than I usually do. In the end, I made a (usual) mistake of adding extra spices for fear of it making too bland. I regretted that decision while eating dinner.

But fear not, I ate the dinner with an extra portion of curd which made things significantly bearable. In the end, I also added some curd to gravy to make it tolerable

All in all, it was a great experience. It takes time to prepare this dish. But time and efforts are worth for the end product you get. The video link I attached should be able to help you for the most part. If you specifically want to know my personal experience, feel free to message me.

Before I end the post, here are some of the snaps I captured while preparing this delicacy,

Hope you've enjoyed this post. Until next time when I post about another spicy and tasty Indian dish