Paneer curry au van driver

Everyone has at least one great meal in them that you should steal

I recently hired a van and driver to help me move some furniture across London. As soon as the driver realised I was on my own, he started indulging in the most gentle inappropriate man chat I have ever experienced. No demeaning women, no aggression towards anyone, just unwanted advice of many awkward types. He taught me:

1. How to swear at “Indian” comedy audiences. I intentionally forgot what he said immediately. I can offend anyone from any culture accidentally without help.

2. How to make “Indian viagra”. You start with half a pint of full-fat milk which you heat in a pan, bringing it to the stage of intense bubbling then removing it from the heat three times. You then take five dates, remove the stones and roll the dates on a table top with your hand to warm them. You then eat the dates and a tablespoon of manuka honey, and drink the milk. Wait “about half an hour” then “find your woman”. Apparently it’s better than pharmaceutical viagra because it wears off. Presumably because it’s 40-50g of sugar and you suffer an insulin crash eventually. This is definitely “go to sleep immediately afterwards” viagra.

3. His “jalfrezi” recipe.

4. How to use leftover jalfrezi to make an omelette with garlic bread which once again “will make your woman crazy”.

Let’s do the jalfrezi recipe. And let’s make it baby-friendly, unlike all of the above conversation.

Ingredients (to make enough for twins and two adults)

2 medium onions, diced. Use that fancy dicing technique you learned in a youtube video.

6 medium to large tomatoes also chopped as small as you can be bothered.

Light olive oil for frying

6 cloves garlic finely chopped

“Whatever spices you have”, half a heaped teaspoon of each.

Water 200ml

Milk (I used almond milk) 50ml (or more if you want it creamier)

Paneer 250g

Method:

Get a big frying pan and put it on medium-high heat.

Pour in oil and chuck in diced onions.

When the onions start to brown (and NOT BEFORE THIS IS WHY YOUR CURRIES HAVE BEEN RUBBISH UNTIL THIS DAY STEVE) add the garlic and spices. Stir.

Tomatoes go in. Stir.

Water goes in. Stir.

Wait for 20-30 minutes.

When you think the curry is nearly done and everything has boiled down a bit add the paneer and stir.

A couple of minutes later when things are basically done add the milk and stir.

Take off heat. Cool. Feed to babies. If they’re like mine they will eat it all and end up with sauce spread thickly from their eyebrows to their chins. Babies love anything that tastes of browned onions, I think.

THE SECRETS

This is a really simple dish which means you have to get all the little things right or it will be really dull. Don’t try and speed it up and only use fresh stuff. We’ll use frozen garlic and tinned tomatoes when we’re making big complex dishes with lots of contrasting flavours. Here we’re trying to make a healthy curry that the babies think is delicious and we can eat too. Apparently eating the same food at the same time as your babies helps them to accept a wide variety of foods as they grow. It also saves on washing up.

There are two schools of thought on paneer. I see it as a simple source of protein and fat for babies, and a cheese they can eat because it’s much lower in salt that all other cheeses. The other school is that of the van driver who says it’s “a hard food” which should only be “fed to men who are going to spend the day building roads”.

Similarly use light olive oil not ghee because “ghee gets to your heart”.

For this dish I used sweet paprika, cumin and turmeric for my spices. You can try different mixes to get different curries. I bought fresh turmeric and grated it, putting in about a heaped teaspoonful. You should do this so that a. your hands look like you use chewing tobacco and b. whoever you serve the dish to goes “wow did you grate the turmeric?” when they look in your kitchen. DO NOT PUT THE GRATER OR TURMERIC AWAY UNTIL THEY NOTICE. FIND REASONS TO GET THEM TO COME INTO THE KITCHEN AND DO THINGS NEAR THE GRATER UNTIL THEY NOTICE.

HOW TO MAKE A GROWN UP VERSION

We made our grownup portions by adding chilli flakes and Aromat at the table. You need Aromat in your life – it’s halfway between salt and vegetable stock powder and makes anything vegetarian and savoury sing.

If you were cooking only for grownups you could throw in vegetable stock powder and fresh chopped chilis at the spices stage and then regret toughing your contact lenses.