Saag Paneer Calzone/Spinach Paneer Curry Calzone (whole wheat)

love Italian food! Love eating it and love cooking it. Love the different layers, flavors complex yet simple, exotic yet rustic just like Indian food. You can sense the rich culture and the legacy from the food .
Our (indians) love for indo-chinese is well known but another cuisine that has come in from across the shores and become a part of the cuisine... is Italian. With its pastas and pizza and other goodies and use of herbs, five star restaurants as well as hole-in-the-wall stores near every street now have some kind of “pizza” on their menu! It keeps the essense of pizza that is a thick bread smothered in tomato ketchup topped with melty cheese, but almost always has a local (desi) touch to it whether it be use of paneer or chicken! Lots of fusion recipes have been born, you can easily find panner pizza even butter chicken pizza in any pizza hut franchise in india - I have few on my blog too. This time around I took my classic saag paneer recipe and tucked inside a calzone and the result was a beautiful marrige of two of my favorite cuisines - a fusion food heaven!
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Ghee - from homemade Butter

larified butter or ghee is used extensively in India and other South Asian cuisines. Also, practically any Hindu religious ritual is incomplete without the use of ghee. It has a lovely rich and nutty flavor, and enhances the flavor and taste of anything that it is added to. Ghee, as the English version of its name 'clarified-butter' suggests, is prepared from butter. How is butter made? Well, from cream; and cream is made from milk. In this post, I pick it up from store-bought cream and make my own butter and then turn it magically into ghee! You can choose to pick up directly from butter or if you are a little more adventurous than me (like my mom is), then you might as well pick up from milk and gather your own cream. Back in India my mom always prepares Ghee from scratch. She used to collect the cream daily off the milk brought by the doodhwallahs/door-to-door milk vendors, until the container with cream was full and ready to be made into Ghee.

The process behind it is quite magical (scientific for those who understand how these things work chemically). As you churn it with a whisk, cream which otherwise is a runny liquid, changes to a frothy texture. This happens rather quickly, what we popularly know as whipped cream. Now if you be patient and keep at it, after enough whisking, the buttermilk separates from the cream and behold you have butter!

Unsalted butter is slowly brought to a boil upon which the milk solids separate from the clarified butter.

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Desi Coffee / Indian Espresso - by him!

ere is a instant coffee recipe that is now on top of my list of recipes for coffee based drinks. The other day on a lazy sunday afternoon we felt like some hot coffee. Just when I was about to put a pot on, hubby out-of-the-blue asked if I had any instant coffee. He had suddenly recalled how him and his hostel buddies used to make instant coffee during college days.

There is no way I am ever going to drink hot coffee any other way now. I am so hooked. It is special also as I believe somehow it makes me a part of those days when he was in college (of course I gave him a hard time about what took him all these years to get reminded of it :) Besides the emotional aspect of it, I was also enamored by the details of the steps involved in getting it perfect.

Let me tell you that this coffee is the way coffee is done in Indian households (except with his twist in the whisking process). If you have lived outside of India for a while and your taste buds have gotten used to the bitter black coffee (or for that matter have never tasted 'Indian coffee'), this may take a little getting used to. This coffee is much lighter in color, is sweet, is milk based and is totally out of this world good.

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