“The ability to put a good dinner on the table has become my superpower,” writes Meera Sodha in the introduction to her fourth cookbook, Dinner. London-based Sodha, who writes The New Vegan, a weekly column for the Guardian’s Feast magazine, turned to dinner when the idea of cooking became overwhelming – leading to months when she ate for necessity over pleasure.
Eventually, Sodha was galvanised to cook again by the idea of doing so for pleasure instead of work. She cooked according to what she wanted to eat and recorded the results in a little orange notebook – which now forms the basis of this new cookbook. “The old orange book filled up fast, and as it did, I realised I was drawn to one meal above the others: dinner.”
Each of the 120 vegetarian and vegan recipes in Dinner is deeply personal to Sodha; they are the recipes that led her back to her love of cooking, many of them inspired by her recent travels to Thailand and Taiwan, as well as her Ugandan Indian heritage. That means sticky mango and lime paneer stuffed in naan sits alongside an egg omelette with nam pla, as well as recipes for miso butter greens pasta and this baked butter paneer, a mostly hands-off recipe that yields a vibrant spice-packed dish.
“I used to eat paneer butter masala regularly with an Indian friend, Aditya, at a little place near Russell Square in London until one day something awkward happened that meant we never went back,” she writes. “That day, he made the error of wearing a black shirt and black trousers to dinner and, like a rugby player with the ball, was tackled a couple of times on his way to the bathroom as he was mistaken for a waiter. Aditya, this one’s for you.”
Surprisingly, given the dish’s name, Sodha’s butter paneer doesn’t actually contain any butter. “I should address the awkward truth that I don’t use butter here but cream instead,” she writes. “You could, if you’re a stickler for tradition (and not a heretic like me), add a big slab of butter to the finished curry.”
Kasoori methi are dried fenugreek leaves – you should be able to buy them at South Asian grocery stores or online.
Meera Sodha’s baked butter paneer
Serves 4
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 1 hour and 15 minutes
Ingredients
Naan, to serve
Slab of butter (optional), to serve
Paneer
3 tbsp rapeseed oil, plus extra for brushing
500g hard paneer, cut into 2½cm cubes
6 cloves garlic, crushed
2cm x 2cm ginger, finely grated
1 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder
½ tbsp lemon juice, from ½ lemon
¾ tsp salt
½ tsp ground turmeric
5 tbsp (75g) Greek yoghurt
Butter sauce
1 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder
1 tsp garam masala
1 tsp ground cardamom
¾ tsp salt
2 tbsp runny honey
2 400g tins finely chopped tomatoes
150ml double cream
1½ tbsp kasoori methi
Method
Preheat the oven to 200°C fan/220°C/gas 7 and line a deep baking tray or oven dish (roughly 20cm x 30cm) with non-stick baking paper. Brush the paper with a little oil.
Put the paneer cubes into a mixing bowl and add half the garlic, half the ginger and then the chilli powder, lemon juice, salt, turmeric and yoghurt. Mix well, tip on to the baking tray and bake for 25 minutes, or until the paneer is crisp and starting to blacken ever so slightly at the edges.
Take the baking tray out of the oven and very carefully remove the baking paper, leaving the paneer in the tray. Add 3 tbsp of oil and the remaining ginger and garlic, stir to coat the paneer in the garlicky oil, then add the spices for the butter sauce, the salt and the honey. Stir to mix, then tip in the tomatoes, making sure the paneer is completely covered, and pop back in the oven for 30 minutes.
Remove the tray, stir through the cream, crumble over the kasoori methi, then stir again and pop back in the oven for 10 minutes. Remove the tray once more, stir in the butter now if you’d like, then serve straight from the tray with hot naan.
Excerpted from Dinner by Meera Sodha, published by Penguin Random House, RRP $55.
