Saag Panir

Reading Nabokov.  I have only the greatest memories of reading ‘Pnin’ in my twenties.  But this time I’m reading it aloud to my older one.  We have finally finished our slog through Crime and Punishment.  But I’m not sure how much longer we’ll continue.  It was long but there is never a boring page in that novel.  ‘Pnin’ is less gripping.  There are long academic sidebars that don’t seem to translate well, read aloud at the end of a long day.  I’m hopeful we’ll hit our stride.  If we don’t we’ll put Vladimir down and pull something else from the shelf.   I don’t think it will be “Lolita.”

We’ve a bottle of Indian curry in the fridge and a bottle of mango chutney by the same company.  Dinner was on my shoulders so I figured I’d work on some vaguely Indian tastes.  One thing I’d certainly order if we went to our local Pakistani place is Saag Panir: the spinach dish with cubes of curdled milk.  Normally I’d wing it, but what it is precisely that constitutes that taste beyond the spinach and the cheese was a mystery to me.

You need cumin seeds.  The market only had powder.   You need fennel and fenugreek.  Good luck getting them at the local market here.  I’m not going to make my own homemade curds.  But I imagine a block of feta will do.  I liked the first recipe I saw.  It made the fewest demands, and I stuck with it.

I sautéed my spinach and cumin powder and it all started to look rather “panir” like.  I added too much milk and I guess it should have been cream.  But the end result wasn’t bad.  I’m not sure my wife was convinced but both my daughters liked the cheese and for this American, living in Beijing, trying to capture the tastes of Delhi, I took that for a box tick.