Meera Sodha’s latest cookbook, Dinner, is packed with 120 vegan and vegetarian recipes – every single one of them for dinner. There’s kimchi and tomato spaghetti, baked butter paneer, eggplant in satay sauce and other cuisine-agnostic dishes designed for a midweek meal or a dinner-party centrepiece.
Every recipe is the result of a challenging time for Sodha; she had lost her passion for cooking and, for the first time in her life, began to eat only out of necessity. “Food was how I spent my days and paid my bills,” the cookbook author and Guardian UK food columnist writes. “It was the language I spoke fluently.”
Eventually, Sodha found her way back into the kitchen with one rule: she would cook for pleasure, not work. Soon she realised what brought her pleasure was cooking dinner. And those are the recipes found in this cookbook, which draws together flavours and ingredients that reflect Sodha’s travels and Ugandan-Indian heritage. One of those recipes makes for an unexpected, fun dish to serve your dinner-party guests, or simply to dig into after work one evening: sticky mango and lime paneer naans.
“Good things come in threes: buses, the little pigs and Destiny’s Child,” she writes. “I’m adding paneer, naan and mango chutney to that list. Don’t be put off by the list of ingredients: there’s very little cooking to be done here.”
Meera Sodha’s sticky mango and lime paneer naans
Serves 4
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes
Ingredients
5 tbsp Greek yoghurt
5 tbsp mayonnaise
½ tbsp mild curry powder
3½ tbsp mango chutney
½ red cabbage (250g), core removed, the rest very finely shredded
1½ tsp salt
2 limes, 1 juiced to get 2 tbsp, the other quartered
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 tbsp gram (chickpea) flour
1 tbsp rapeseed oil
500g hard paneer, cut into 2½ cm cubes
4 shop-bought naan or flatbreads
30g fresh mint leaves
Method
First, make the curried mayo. Put the yoghurt, mayonnaise, curry powder and a tbsp of mango chutney into a bowl, mix well and leave to one side.
Next, place the shredded cabbage in a bowl with ½ tsp of salt, then scrunch with clean hands until wilted. (If you get red hands, scrub them with the inside of the juiced lime to remove the colour.)
For the sticky mango and lime glaze, put the lime juice, remaining 2½ tbsp of mango chutney, the garlic, gram flour, remaining 1 tsp of salt and 3 tbsp of water into a bowl and stir well.
Put the oil into a frying pan over a medium to high heat. When hot, fry the paneer, turning every minute or so to brown each side, for around 5 minutes. Turn the heat down, add the mango and lime glaze and cook for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring, until the glaze goes sticky and coats the paneer cubes.
Heat the naan or flatbreads (I zap them in the microwave), then slather over the curry mayonnaise, scatter over the cabbage, cover with the paneer and sprinkle with some mint leaves. Squeeze over some more lime, then roll up and eat.
Excerpt from Dinner by Meera Sodha, published by Penguin Random House, RRP $55.
