India: Curry is the answer, no matter the question
Hello Kryddhyllan friends, long time no see! It’s been… awhile since our last post, and a lot has happened since then – including bringing two new foodies into the world, getting some travels in, and of course, eating our way around Stockholm and the world. We’ve had our hands full, but when we were given the chance to have a cooking sesh with our latest guests, we jumped at the opportunity. We’ve been waiting to do a post on this most recent country for the longest time and had done posts on many of its neighboring countries, so we were so excited to finally make… Indian cuisine!!!
We recently had the chance to meet up with the lovely Mansi and Raghu, a couple that have called Stockholm home for almost a decade, to cook one of their favorite dishes: matar paneer, a comforting mix of paneer and peas in a delicious curry that was bursting with vibrant flavors in every bite. We quickly learned that Indian cooking is all about spices – more specifically, the unique (and always delicious) combinations of spices that make every dish feel just like home.
As the dish simmered on the stove, we talked about what brought them to Sweden, the foods they miss most from back home, and how they’ve been recreating those flavors and incorporating new ones since moving here. They also shared some of their favorite new restaurants around Stockholm (amazing tips!) – places that are bringing exciting new tastes to the Stockholm food scene. So let’s dive in and learn how to make what is sure to become a new favorite in your dinner repertoire – matar paneer!
Recipe for Matar Paneer
A vegetarian dish that is more common in the Northern regions of India. You can make many varieties with this dish, simply add in whichever protein and vegetables that you like after making the spicy tomato base. Our chef Raghu phrased it well: in Indian cooking the spices and flavours take centre stage, and then you can add in whichever vegetables or protein you see fit, whilst in western cooking we usually centre the dish around the protein, carb or vegetable and let the spices enhance the flavour.
Serves 4 people
Cooking time: about 1 hour
Listen to: while we were prepping the feast, we enjoyed the most popular tracks of India with this playlist
Ingredients:
3 tbsp cooking oil (we used rape seed oil)
1-1,5 tsp cumin seeds
1-2 Indian green chili, slit
1 bay leaf, dried
1 cinnamon stick
3-4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1½ tbsp ginger, grated or finely chopped
3 onions, medium sized, roughly chopped
1 tsp turmeric
0,5 tsp Indian red chilli powder (adjust to how spicy you want the dish)
1 tsp dried coriander
3 medium fresh tomatoes or 1 box 400g of crushed tomatoes
0,5 dl water
2 tsp salt
2x225g Paneer, cubed (Alpetina best type according to our chef)
1¼ cups green peas (200g), fresh or frozen
1,5 tsp garam masala (Chef’s own mix)
1 tsp dried fenugreek seeds (kasthuri methi)
2-3 tbsp cooking cream
Fresh coriander – 2 tablespoons finely chopped
Butter – 1 tablespoon (optional)
To drink: Serve with chaas, a chilled yoghurt drink with herbs, perfect for matching the spicier Indian meals:
(4 servings)
2 cups neutral yoghurt (we used thick Turkish youghurt, 10% fat)
3 cups water (adjust to preferred thickness)
1 tsp salt
1,5 tsp cumin
0,5 tsp ground ginger
1 tbsp fresh coriander and/or mint
Add all ingredients in a blender and mix, add ice to desired coolness.
And finally it was time to relax and enjoy this incredible feast!
Interview Time
Kryddhyllan: What’s your favourite food from home and why?
Mansi: I’m from the West, so I really like a lot of fish dishes. It’s with rice, a different kind of rice than what you get here, with fish and red curry, a super tangy curry, it’s really nice.
Kryddhyllan: Sounds delicious. Is it a fish you can find here?
Mansi: No, it’s a local fish, a white fish called pomfret. You put in the curry and fry it with some spices and rice. It’s a staple from the region, it’s really really good.
Kryddhyllan: It sounds amazing! Why is it your favourite?
Mansi: I kind of grew up eating it, so it has a lot of memories attached to my childhood, and it feels like home. It also has a lot of flavours which are very local to the region that I come from, so all that makes it super special.
Kryddhyllan: Definitely.
Raghu: Mine is a dish called Veppam Poo Rasam. It’s actually a lentil soup, but it’s a very light, very watery, with a tangy taste. There are many types of rasams, but this one has a dried flowers of the neem tree as its key ingredient – it’s super crispy and yummy. You can actually get the dried flowers here as well.
Kryddhyllan: Mmm, dried flowers in food sounds so fancy!
Raghu: Yes, it’s very unique, super tasty!
Kryddhyllan: And we talked about it a little bit earlier, but what brought you here to Sweden?
Raghu: I came here to study, I had a friend who studied at Chalmers, and he told med that Sweden was super different from India and that he enjoyed it a lot and that I should give it a shot. He said that it was a much more collaborative environment, because where I grew up it was always very competitive, I was always studying to get better grades than someone else, I never thought about “do I like this subject or education or not?”. So I came to Sweden to give it a shot and see if I would like it or not, and I really liked it, I thrived a lot during my studies, so I decided to stay on and continue living here.
Mansi: I was in Australia and decided to take an exchange semester to see how Sweden is, I’d never been to Europe before and I’d heard a lot of good things (from Raghu mostly), and so I figured let’s try this out. It was super chill, the academics were very relaxed, there was no pressure – things worked out work-wise as well, and so when I went back to Australia, it felt like logistically Sweden was the best place I could be.
Kryddhyllan: Wow, so Sweden was the first place you visited in Europe? Have you been to other places since moving here?
Mansi: Yeah, the past 2-3 years I’ve travelled quite a bit. But yeah, Sweden was the first European country I came to.
Kryddhyllan: Cool, yeah Sweden’s kind of extreme in some ways, it’s a very quiet corner of Europe – compared to India maybe all of Europe is a bit sleepy, but this is the…sleepiest part for sure *laughs*. It’s also maybe not the top destination people choose when they think of Europe.
Mansi: Definitely, all of our friends from India will be like “yeah we spent two days in Sweden, now it’s time to go to Italy! Let’s see something exciting”. We’re always saying that we can show them the forest, show them the boat museum, and they’re just like… nah…
Kryddhyllan: Let’s go see the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum instead! But do you have any new favourite dishes since moving here?
Raghu: I’ve learned a lot more Marathi dishes since Mansi moved here. So Amti, that’s also a lentil soup but made in a Western Indian style, that I really like. It also involves a dried flower, but a totally different type. It’s tangier, from the mangosteen family. That one I really like, the flavor is really light, it just comes and goes. But maybe that wasn’t really the answer to your question?
Kryddhyllan: It can be both! Stockholm is a city with a lot of different food cultures.
Mansi: For me, salmon was never a never a part of my diet even though I really like fish. Now that I’ve been introduced to salmon I really, really enjoy it. With the white sauce, and the fish eggs, the roe. I get a lot of that at work and I really like it – sometimes it feels like I just go to work to eat fish *laughs*.
Raghu: We also signed up for Hello Fresh for a few months, and that really introduced us to a lot of new dishes – Mexican food, risotto, and other dishes.
Kryddhyllan: Sweden loves Mexican food! Tacofredag and all that. We’re not that traditionalist. At least, not in Stockholm maybe – Stockholm has a pretty diverse food scene, not sure if it’s a recent development. It also feels as though Sweden’s food culture is not as strong as say, Italy or France – there, it feels as though food is almost part of your identity, but here it’s not (maybe because we don’t think our food is as good?). But what did you guys know about Swedish food before coming here?
Mansi: Meatballs were of course super famous, and then I’d heard of surströmming, which is more infamous. I think these were the two things that I knew. Then I knew that they ate reindeer in Sweden, so once when Raghu was coming to India I asked him to bring me some reindeer, so he brought me some reindeer chips. That to me sounded quite exotic.
Kryddhyllan: Were they tasty? They sound interesting.
Mansi: Yeah, they were actually.
Raghu: I’m vegetarian, so when I looked into the foods it wasn’t super exciting from me. But I knew about meatballs and also surströmming before coming here. But I actually didn’t know how to cook at all before I left home, so I did a crash course with my mom who showed me what to cook and how to cook. I’d say my cooking level has been quite stagnant until the last couple of years, it’s increasing again and I’m getting better at cooking.
Kryddhyllan: Nice! What would you say is the best and worst thing about Swedish food?
Raghu: I think European food in general, I’d say that the ingredients are the most important, like what you’re cooking, if its meat or vegetables then there’s a huge focus on the meat or the vegetables and less on the spices – they’re more of a complement. I think in that I’ve learned about the quality of ingredients, how the quality of say, a sweet potato or potato or whatever you’re cooking adds a lot of flavour, I’ve become much more aware of the flavours from good quality fruits or vegetables and I enjoy that a lot more. That’s the best part.
Mansi: I like that the quality of food is really good, and that gave me reassurance that whatever I’m putting in my body is good. You can also taste that the food is good quality. However, I like the variety of foods that I had in Asia, so that’s something I didn’t like so much when coming here.
Kryddhyllan: If you guys could pick one food or one food category to eat for the rest of your life and why? We tried to be nice and expand to category and not just one specific food.
Raghu: In South India we have rice and rasam, or sambar, so that I think I could eat forever – I have eaten it forever, so I already know I could live on that.
Mansi: For me it’s fish, just different types of fish.
Kryddhyllan: You guys are very healthy, you had very healthy options, you’ll live for a long time! We had someone who said potatoes once?
Raghu: What about you guys?
Kryddhyllan: (Alex) If I had to pick a category it would be sandwiches, because there are so many different types of sandwiches with different ingredients. (Anna) I dunno… I do enjoy fried rice a lot, and I feel like it’s a good dish that you can put a lot of stuff in, and flavours to make it different, but the same. And I do love rice, but I also love lasagna. But I feel like it’s hard to eat lasagna every day for the rest of my life.
Raghu: Yeah, it’s a bit difficult to be creative with lasagna.
Kryddhyllan: (Alex) you could make rice lasagna!
Raghu: Yeah, fried rice lasagna.
Kryddhyllan: And what about spices or flavourings? What’s your spice of life?
Mansi: Garam masala!
Raghu: I don’t really like garam masala that much…
Kryddhyllan: Perhaps the Swedish curry spice? *laughs*
Raghu: Definitely that one *laughs*
Mansi: Maybe tamarind?
Raghu: I would go for red chili powder, the Indian red chili powder.
Mansi: Hmmm, or garlic!
Raghu: But so ONLY that spice forever?
Kryddhyllan: We could say flavour instead, because I mean salt is technically not a spice but you use it to flavour food.
Raghu: I mean my favourite spice probably is still red chili, but I really like the spices we used today, the mix of all of them together. The spice mix my mom makes is also really good.
Mansi: I like this umami flavour that comes with oyster sauce, or tamarind, that flavour is so good.
Kryddhyllan: It adds so much character. Umami flavours. And what’s the best meal you’ve ever had?
Raghu: Ooh. I remember when I lived in pretty harsh conditions in India when I was studying in a hostel in a very remote part and then I also worked in the industry for a few years in a very remote part and I remember the food was terrible, like so bad that I couldn’t eat enough. I was losing weight, I was getting stomach ulcers because it was so bad. So when I would come back home and my mom would make one of my favourite dishes called okra bindhi, it’s made with okra, with rasam and sambar and rice. That would be my favourite meal, I would come back from being completely starving, having lost 5 kg and my mom would just feed me for 10 days or so.
Kryddhyllan: Oh wow, how long did you do that for?
Raghu: 4 years studying and 3 years working, so 7 years in total.
Mansi: For me it would be something more traditional. I think just home-cooked food, with the rice, and the roti.
Raghu: I think I remember your favourite meal! Fish thali!
Mansi: Yes, fish thali! The traditional meal is a blend of everything, it’s the fish curry, it’s rice, it’s leafy vegetables. In India you get it as a thali, it’s one full plate with a lot of small dishes. That would definitely be my last meal.
Raghu: Yeah, and the thing with thali, you wouldn’t make 10 dishes at home, versus when you go to a restaurant, everything is prepared already.
Kryddhyllan: That sounds great. And last question, what is your favourite restaurant at the moment?
Raghu: I think we have two very different levels – one is called Nour. It’s super nice, really good food. It’s just near Nosh&Chow, it’s a Japanese Scandinavian fusion. We ate quite late, and I remember when we were finished around 11 or 12 at night there was a separate room for coffee, tea and dessert and that was insane. The tea was unbelievable, it also had flowers and stuff inside. The overall experience was just amazing. Now my current favourite is actually Cafe Mumbai Tadka, the streetfood café. When we go back to India, every day we would take a ten-minute walk from our apartment around 5-6 pm and get some streetfood. That’s a ritual that we can do here because this place is also a ten-minute walk from our apartment, so we can go for a snack in the evening, so I’m super excited about that – and the food is super good.
Mansi: I really like Mexican food – La Neta is really good, and there’s one that’s opened in Mall of Scandinavia which is really good. I’m currently in a Mexican mood.
Kryddhyllan: Have you been to Chelas? It’s in Hornstull and it’s really amazing Mexican food. There’s also one close to Rådmansgatan, Xulo. Mmm, Mexican food is delicious. We’re almost hungry again thinking of delicious food after feasting on this delicious Indian meal with you guys. Thank you so much!
