Lessons from cooking Dhaba style Paneer

Paneer

Usually when we use Gopi Paneer, we move it from the freezer to the non freezer side of the refrigerator a day before.
Unexpectedly, I had to cook for more vegetarians. Paneer is a special dish but its in the freezer. I tried the defrost for about 7-8 min and it worked wonders. Like I bought myself a gone day in this respect of having th paneer soft.





This recipe turned out great but I learned that the circumference of the vessel makes a difference. I used a very wide pan that the frying of the masalas wasnt very good. For my next curry, I used a smaller pan where I could see right away the missed chance of making a good dripping gravy.
I was thinking about my cooking and I realized that it is very unique in the sense that I never repeat the dishes. This realization is from a table topics from a Toastmaster meeting where the theme was to talk of an item picked from a bag, in an Antiques Roadshow style where a participant said that the yo-yo looking thing was from the cave (with reference to the Leonardo Cave speech I gave few minutes before). He said that it was never used by anyone before and hence its unique. Coming back to the cooking , I like to try new recipes each time.  



In this recipe, there is the first part about cooking the Besan aka Chickpea Flour a bit, to remove the raw taste. Again the size of the dish.. I thought that if I did that in a wider pan, then it would stick to the pan and would be difficult to handle. Whoever has learnt how to transfer stuff from big pans into smaller ones.. I cooked it in a very small pan used for seasoning. 



And there they were.. the lumps in the besan. Luckily they were too small to interfere with the taste. I grated both the onions and tomato which turned out to be better for cooking them well. One of the guests liked it. I forwarded him the link to the recipe. Try how much I might, instead of doing the same recipe and perfecting it, I would want to do something that I havent made in that style before.