Indian Cuisine Improvisations By Shyam

Whenever somebody asks me "what is Russian food?", I have hard time answering it. It is whatever we cooked at home in Russia. Same goes for Shyam and Indian food. It is only as being an outsider to any country or region, one can fit a whole cuisine of that region/country into few specific dishes and blissfully ignore all the other dishes that can be produced with any number of ingredients from that region/country. One has to go beyond a few specific recipes to truly cook a dish from a different cuisine. One has to understand the local ingredients and methods and then a whole new world of possibilities opens up.

Case in point is tonight's dinner. Shyam cooks killer saag paneer (creamed spinach dish with a kind of Indian cheese). Tonight however we are missing a few ingredients for how Shyam likes to prepare his version of this dish and how he likes the flavors to be, so we have to adjust. The basic idea of saag paneer is that sauce is based on pureed spinach with spices, and then protein (paneer) is added to the sauce. We are replacing paneer with fish and adjusting spices and vegetables to create balanced flavors where we don't have our usual ingredients for the dish.

Start with blanching the spinach.

Then puree spinach in a blender.

Chop onions.

Heat oil in the pan, add lightly crushed black cardamom, cinnamon, cumin, a bit of turmeric and asefoetida, and onions.

Fry for a few minutes, then add ginger-garlic paste, ground coriander and chipotle chile powder.

Stir for a few minutes. Then add spinach, mix well and cook for about 10 minutes, covered.

Cut the fish. We were using catfish tonight.

Add fish to the pan, and cook for a few minutes, until fish is almost done.

Add cream and mix.

Let simmer for few minutes, salt to taste.

Enjoy with rice.

This was a wonderful and delicious improvisation from Shyam.