Matar Paneer (Paneer with Peas)

A favorite dish of mine since I was young, I recently made this dish for a party we had at our house and it was a hit! If you're not familiar with making Indian food, don't worry its not too hard! Simply follow these instructions:

Ingredients:
-1 large onion, diced
-4 tomatoes
-1 serrano (or jalapeno) chili
-ginger
-garlic
--All of the above will be ground together to make the paste for the sauce
-1 lb paneer (a type of cheese, you can find this at an Indian grocery store) cubed
-1 lb frozen peas
-turmeric
-salt
-paprika
-cumin
-coriander
-garam masala (also easy to find at an Indian grocery store)
-oil
-jeera
-fennel
- cilantro (for paste and garnish)

Directions:
1) Blend tomato, onion, chili, garlic, cilantro, and ginger together to make a paste.
2) Lightly pan fry the paneer with oil, drain.
3) Add fennel and jeera to oil.
4) When seeds splutter, add paste, salt, and turmeric.
5) Cover with lid.
6) When gravy and oil separate (check periodically for this) add in peas (and water if necessary, my frozen peas had enough water from being frozen).
7) Add other spices
8) When peas are cooked (not frozen but not mushy) add paneer
9) Mix together.
Enjoy! :-)

Candied Sweet Potatoes

This recipe came from AllRecipes.com, and made an amazing sweet potato casserole! Its kind of funny that we made this, since I was always curious about the dish but the rest of my family thought it sounded gross. Well they were wrong! Everyone loved it so much, that we're planning on making Sweet Potatoes every year!

INGREDIENTS:

4 pounds sweet potatoes, quartered 1 1/4 cups margarine 1 1/4 cups brown sugar

3 cups miniature marshmallows, divided ground cinnamon to taste ground nutmeg to taste

DIRECTIONS:

1.	Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Grease a 9x13 inch baking dish.
2.	Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add potatoes and boil until slightly underdone, about 15 minutes. Drain, cool and peel.
3.	In a large saucepan over medium heat, combine margarine, brown sugar, 2 cups marshmallows, cinnamon and nutmeg. Cook, stirring occasionally, until marshmallows are melted.
4.	Stir potatoes into marshmallow sauce. While stirring mash about half of the potatoes, and break the others into bite-sized chunks. Transfer to prepared dish.
5.	Bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes. Remove from oven and cover top evenly with remaining marshmallows. Return to oven and bake until marshmallows are golden brown.

Baked Potato and Chili

Ingredients:

Large baker potatoes   4

Pinto beans. 2 large cans

Tomato canned with chilli 1

Onion 1 diced

Anaheim pepper 1 diced

Frozen corn 1/2 cup

Garlic 2 cloves

Oil 2 tbsp

Chili powder 1/2 tsp

Salt

Black pepper

Cumin powder 1 tsp

Oregano  a couple of sprinkles

Paprika 1 tsp

Turn oven on to 375. Wash and scrub potatoes. 

Prick each potato with a fork a couple of times. Place potatoes on a cookie sheet and bake for about an hour. Potatoes are done when a steak knife can pierce it smoothly.

For chili

Use large pot. Add oil, garlic, onion, green pepper, Anaheim pepper and sauté. Add corn and sauté. When onions are translucent, add tomatoes. Add rinsed beans, all spices. Simmer till flavors meld when tasted.

Enjoy! :-)