Palak Paneer Recipe (Spinach Curry with Cheese) & Cooking in an Indian Kitchen

Love your recipes.Thanks for sharing.

Dear Mrs. Zhu,
I was surprised to hear from you! I have marveled at all the recipes you have online. I am not only copying them out but making copies of them into a loose-leaf notebook for my granddaughter (8 years old) for her life when I am gone.
I gave my daughter the information and she is going to your site too. She loves Chinese food! I love the Indian recipe for spinach! I just love spinach!
You asked for my favorite Chinese dishes and made without pork or seafood, because we are Jewish. I have to tell you about the best here first. There was a well-known restaurant called Ming’s, Palo Alto, California. We always went there to celebrate, but they closed it down, to rebuilt it into a hotel, with a smaller Chinese restaurant for all meals. Not open yet!
My favorite was their delicate Steamed Lemon Chicken. I loved it! For a time they sold the lemon sauce in glass medium sized jars and I would buy it. But I would like to learn how to create the whole chicken dish and lemon sauce. It was not acidic nether was it too sweet. I don’t like the sweet lemon sauce.
We loved their boneless Peking Duck and it was so tender and I loved their accompanying fresh crisp salad with a sweet/sour dressing. No one makes both that good! But their pancakes for the duck were no good.
On the other hand a Chinese Restaurant named Hong Fu in Cupertino makes excellent pancakes but their Duck is no good!
My first Chinese cuisine teacher Mrs, Lily Chinn (gone now) taught us how to make Tomato Curry Beef on whole Pan Fried Noodle Pancakes. It was not sweet and so delicious. I always made it. She also taught us how to make Sweet and Sour Meat with vinegar, soy sauce sugar, salt, bean curd, pineapple cubes and vegetables. I used chicken and beab Curd. She introduced us to sesame oil which I always use. I make those vegetables fresh, in season like snow peas or broccoli or with spinach, or with different kinds of mushrooms or bean curd. I got to know them this way.
She introduced us to Chinese dried mushrooms and dried Black fungus, bamboo shoots, shining noodles and bean sprouts. She did not give us tools or forks but insisted we learn from the first day to use chopped sticks in cooking and to eat with them. She even published her own paper backed cookbook. I bought it.
We love Vegetable Hot and Sour Soup. We introduced each of our three young children to it. Now adults and two have families and they introduced them to this soup. The oldest died. We ate it for years. We watered it at first for them but then decreased the water gradually. It was a family favorite. I made it for years too. I used dried mushrooms, the Black Fungus, Lily buds etc.
I discovered Chicken Corn Soup in a small Chinese restaurant, while on vacation visiting the city of Huntington after the Huntington Museums and Garden. Before this soup came here. I went home and made it. We live in Palo Alto, California.
We loved the Red Bean pastries for dessert at Hong Fu’s. For the Chinese New Year, one year they had little curly tailed piggies for the year of the Pig. That shape is gone now. At Chef Chinn’s restaurant it is not really good or made into cunning animal shapes for the Chinese New Year’s.
My husband is crazy about Hong Fu’s Chinese Chicken Salad. I am not because they use too tiny pieces of chicken. I make it thicker small pieces. I use toasted sesame seeds, iceberg lettuce and a lot of fresh cilantro leaves. But their dressing is rather good! I brought it to our synagogue for a potluck supper in a huge bowl and it was gone in a wink.
The best Tangerine Beef was from a Chinese restaurant in Monterey in an outdoor Shopping Center at the now gone Golden Buddha. For years we ate there, if we visited Carmel and Monterey.
We loved Fried Apple or Fried Banana for dessert. But not at Chef Chinn’s, which is served with whipped cream and is soggy.
In Las Vegas at one Chinese restaurant now gone, years ago, we discovered Green Tea ice cream in a cubed wooden holder. It was so different! Not too sweet. We have ordered it whenever we found it.
At another place – an outdoor shopping center in Las Vegas, I found something called Fried Milk on the menu and very curious I ordered it for dessert. It was not as thick as an egg roll or Jewish blintzes but like a slender cigar and it was delicious! Ice cream that had been frozen and was inside a fried Wong Ton.
We loved the Vietnamese egg rolls, more than the Chinese egg rolls (Spring Rolls) made by students at a booth, at Stanford University and sold at their annual Mother’s Day’s festival years ago. It is gone years past.
My husband is a Ph.D. Stanford graduate mathematician/statistician/bio-statistician who worked at Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. at 3 desks in 3 cities for 31 years. Now 78 he is semi-retired and works with Master’s Degree level nursing students at San Jose State University, when they hire him in Statistics or their professors recommend him to them. He had previously worked at NYU’s Research Center and I.B.M.
While on a tour of Australia and New Zealand, at the New Zealand hotel’s Chinese restaurant, I didn’t feel like eating a whole meal at supper, so I ordered three appetizers. They came with three pieces each and three different sauces. We use supermarket sauces at home. Dynasty’s Sweet & Sour, Plum Sauce, Hoisin Sauce and Duck Sauce because they are easily available in our supermarket. But those sauces in the restaurant were so special! They made the meal along with the appetizers. I offered one piece each to my husband and the sauces. We went wild over them and my husband was crazy about them more than his choice a hot pot dish.
We love lamb but it came in a hot pot style still boiling and took too long to cool to eat it, so we gave up ordering it at Ming’s.
I want to make Ming’s Steak. It was so tender and flavorful!
I am educated at two colleges in New York and California. I graduated at 16 from high school and went to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, it was a branch of the New York State University. I was educated as a fashion/apparel designer.
Married and with children, I went back to college in California and studied for double degrees in art/sculpturing and art history. I studied Hebrew as my foreign language at college, which was taught at my synagogue and 9 years of extra studying at my synagogue including my adult bat mitzvah. Bat = (female) bar = (male).
Mrs. Chinn taught us how use pay dough squares and round and to use commercial. To make won tons and fried won tons. Even a dessert from canned fruit cocktail fried in pay dough/won tons sprinkled, when taken out and laid on paper towels with powdered sugar. Delicious!!!
We didn’t really like anything in Canada or in Puerto Rico. We visited many states like Alaska, in the North, in the East, South and West. We were both born in New York in the Bronx.
In the 1940s there was one Chinese restaurant two blocks from my father’s apartment. Across from it in an alley was a tiny Kosher Jewish poultry shop that sold chickens. They were fresh killed for each customer.
But the rare times my father was there at the restaurant, he would order Chicken Chow Mein or Pepper Steak. I loved the difference! It wasn’t just seeing and smelling the exotic foods that the waiter carried past us but experiencing something. Something different from the same old Chicken Consommé Soup, Vegetable Chow Mein and Pineapple Chunks my mother always ordered.
I was a small child and my mother would buy the chicken and then go into an open booth, next door to the butcher shop, the butcher had and burned off its feathers from a central hanging thing for that purpose. Then she made chicken soup at home, with the chicken cut up parts and stuffed kreplach. That was rectangular in shape and like a filled won tong cooked in the chicken soup with dill. The best part was sometimes the chicken had baby eggs and they were so tend and good!
But she was so selfish and preservative of her own glory, that she never taught me how to cook or a whole recipe. My brother and I did the basic work as children. She kept putting it off with promises like “before you marry, I will take one week off and teach you!” But she never did and a week wasn’t enough time. Now she is gone a couple of years. She died at 95 with dementia.
I had never been allowed to cook much or bake at all. I could only warm up cans of spinach in which I melted butter and heated sour cream. Make scrabbled eggs and toast for breakfast. If I was home lunch was something cold. Supper was half a can of skinless and boneless Portuguese sardines. The other half was for my dog.
I went on without her, borrowing books from the library and taking cooking classes. Experimenting. We watched Julia Child on TV, then I watched Martha Stewart and all the other cooks that came along. I marveled at what is available on our computer.
I would like to learn how to make Mongolian Beef and Beef Lo Mein.
If you have any questions just ask by email. I am profoundly deaf but never attended Deaf schools. I went to normal schools with only lipreading and speech, for two hours at the League of Hard of Hearing on Saturdays. I speak and wearing the last most powerful hearing aid.
I was a Brownie and then flew up into the Girl Scouts. I earned my Second Class and then my First Class badges. I took the training and became a Den Mother for my son and his Cub Scout Troop for two years. I took the training and became a Brownie Leader to my daughter’s large troop. The parents came to me and asked me after a year of assisting the present leader. I was a volunteer in my daughter’s Blue Birds’ group (Camp Fire Girls). I volunteered at my synagogue.
I have recovered from a stroke, that tests at Stanford proved was my third. In August I shall be recovered from four operations, a year of chemo and 25 radiation sessions for third level breast cancer.
I used to grow roses and took them into shows for ribbons and trophies. I belonged to 3 rose Societies. I have two twin grandchildren. I shall be 75 this Summer. I am sorry I took so long to answer!
Sincerely,
Mrs. Marilyn Tomsky

I am so thrilled to find this recipe. Palak Paneer is my absolute favorite food in the world. I used to have a recipe, dictated to me by a friend who was a Professionally Trained Chef and was kind enough to share his techniques with me. Unfortunately, that recipe was lost in one of my moves and I have yet to be able to recreate it.
His version used a measure of fenugreek leaves, but I cannot recall the amount. Do you or you guess chef have any idea how much I should use?
Also, I make cashew cream for my creamy curries. it’s easy to make. Just boil some cashews for a good while, then puree up, adding water to your desired consistency

This looks incredible! I’m obsessed with palak paneer and love that you made the paneer fresh at home. I’ve never used cashews in my own recipe but will definitely have to try. Thanks for sharing!