China Crumpet

Paneer is a kind of Indian milk cheese. My fave is to use it in Palak Paneer, where the cheese is stewed for a little while in a spinach gravy. There are tones of other uses too though and it really is the easiest thing in the world to make.

All you need is:

1 litre milk
1 1/2 tsp vinegar or lemon juice

Boil the milk. When it is boiling, add the vinegar/lemon juice. The mixture will curdle straight away. Turn off the heat and leave it for 5 minutes. Strain the curdled milk into a clean cheese cloth (or cotton kitchen towel) and leave it to drip. You can save the liquid to make bread if you like. When it is dry, tie a knot in the towel (or tie it with a sturdy bit of string) so the cheese is nice and secure in the towel and mould it into a rectangle. Put a heavy weight on top of the whole thing and leave it for a couple of hours to set.

You will be left with a soft bit of white cheese, lovely for cooking with or having with a drizzle of honey. Fried, it turns golden brown and crisp on the outside and soft and mild on the inside. Heaven.

This sounds so unbelievably pretentious that even I almost gag. I know. But what if I told you that home churned butter tastes a million times better than the store bought kind and only takes about 5 minutes to make? Are you still with me? Wouldn’t you like to try as well??

This whole crazy idea comes from a fellow foodie and blogger “kryddburken“. She writes in Swedish so I felt it was my sacred duty to share in English also. But to those of you who read Swedish, check out her stuff!

So to the butter. All you need for 100 g of pure, home made butter is:

• 3 dl (a bit more than a cup) fresh cream
  (NOT homogenized, processed, or any kind of long lasting cream, it’s gotta be fresh cream or it won’t work. Trust me. In Beijing I get it in a ziplock bag at the xinyuanli market. You Swedes can use vispgrädde.)
• about a teaspoon of good quality salt

THAT’S IT! Then you just whip the cream with an electric whisk until it goes stiff, then really stiff and then starts to separate.

NOTE: If you have been whipping for like 6,7,8 minutes and it just keeps being all shiny and whipped creamy, you have the wrong kind of cream. Enjoy it with hot chocolate or a piece of chocolate red wine cake and forget about the whole butter idea until your next trip to the market.

When you think you’ve ruined the whole thing and have lumps of butter swimming around in milky looking watery liquid you are done. Dump the whole thing through a fine-mesh sieve and squeeze the liquid out with clean, cold hands. You should also run it under some cold water to wash off all the separated liquid, this means it will keep longer. When you have your finished lump of butter, add salt to taste and enjoy.

If you have cream that has gone slightly sour, the butter will be better still. In theory, the butter keeps for a while. In practice, it will be eaten long before it comes close to going bad.

Serving suggestion: We had it today for breakfast with breakfast rolls right out of the oven and freshly squeezed orange juice. A breakfast fit for a king.

As usual when I am trying to cut back on the calories, I suddenly have an irresistible urge to bake sweets. So I figure, forget the calories, life is too short to care.

Here is my easiest and fastest recipe for from scratch cookies. They are marvelously independent, take a couple of minutes to whip up, need almost no ingredients and taste like a lazy afternoon with a good book under a sun-umbrella with the sea lapping a few feet away. If you want that bounty-bar (but better) effect, melt some good quality chocolate in a bowl set over a hot water bath and cover them with a luscious layer of chocolate or two once they’ve cooled.

For about 16 cookies you will need:

50 g butter, softened
2 eggs
1 dl (3/4 cup) sugar
5.5 dl (2 1/4 cup) grated, unsweetened coconut

NOTE: If you like you can also add the zest of one lime and a tablespoon or so of dark rum. But they are fine without these add-ons.

Set the oven to 200°C. Mix together all the ingredients in a large bowl, you should have a fairly firm batter. Butter an oven tray thoroughly or line with greaseproof paper (they seriously stick so this step is crucial!). Taking about a tablespoon of the mixture at a time, distribute the batter evenly on the tray and bake for about 15 minutes or until golden and crispy looking. They need some attention in the oven as they are a little burn prone.

Enjoy while listening to Bob Marley.