simmer sauce

The kitchen was closed Friday and Saturday for our weekly dinners out. Friday, we journeyed to the not-very elegant town of Billerica to try a new Indian restaurant that's replaced a favorite old Indian restaurant. The place has been spiffed up with cloth tablecloths and actual design intent -- looks great.

The service is meant to be all sorts of fancy -- wooden carts to bring the food -- that sort of thing. The actual people service is still a little rough. For example, when the waiter came over three or four times before we were ready to order and I said we weren't ready, he'd just stand there waiting until I ordered. Several times I'd smile sweetly and say "You'll have to come back when we're ready" which seemed to get through. In their favor, I think English was not their strong suit.

But the food is quite good. Everything tastes like it's made from scratch, and the tastes are a little different from, and a little more delicious than, what we're used to. We learned a few years ago that Chinese food with an Indian flavor is very popular in India as fast food, and this restaurant serves several Indo-Chinese dishes. So we had a sweet-and-sour dish over vegetable patties -- a nice marriage of two cultures. I'm sure we'll go back and try more of the regions represented.

Oh, the restaurant is Pongal, which is the name of another dish we had -- transporting. If you go to the web site and read the "About" page, you'll see what I mean about the English -- charming and ineffective, but as they say, the dish is very good.

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Anyways, last night, we used some Trader Joe's simmer sauce as the base for our dinner. I put some brown rice on to cook. Then I sauteed onions and paneer* while chopping mushrooms, cauliflower, butternut squash (confession: I sometimes buy the shrink-wrapped peeled, seeded kind just because we don't use it all up fast enough). Potatoes would have been good but we didn't have any.

Then I put the veggies in the pan with the onions, along with a block of frozen tomatoes I had from last summer. I added the simmer sauce (I think it was the Punjab spinach variety), lowered the heat, and covered.

When the rice was done and needed to sit for 15 minutes, I threw in some frozen peas, chopped garlic, turmeric (I have some fresh -- it looks like ginger root on the outside but not on the inside), and chopped ginger and covered and simmered until the rice was done. At the end of the 15 minutes, I stirred everything thoroughly.

It was very tasty and we had lots of leftovers. However, for some reason, we ended up eating so much rice that I made another batch after dinner. Now we probably have more rice made than we'll go through this week. Oh well.

* Paneer is that delicious chewy Indian cheese. We buy it at an Indian grocery store, cut it into cubes, and freeze it so that it's ready to use when inspiration strikes us. We probably use a quarter of a block in any given two-person meal. The paneer holds up well to heat -- it doesn't melt. It's become a favorite staple because, through lack of planning, I find it hard to anticipate when I'll want to use it.