Paneer Tikka

Finally! Some cold weather has come to our shores after a frankly mincing few months of clammy tepidness. Meteorologists have finally got something to do other than twiddle their thumbs, and I don’t know about you but I’m hugely excited to hear the first MET office warning to stay inside and turn the heating up to full so the pipes don’t crack.

This will of course result, as it does every year, in my mother insisting we must go to Tesco and buy an abnormal amount of food in case we’re snowed in for months. The hyperbolic nature of here outlook on life has got so extreme in some cases, that she resides in a state of perpetual embellishment.

“Augustus, there are clothes all over your bedroom floor” - 3 socks and a t-shirt. 

“The kitchen is under water” – The dog’s bowl spilt.

“The television’s broken” – The television, mother, isn’t turned on.

I recall a couple of years ago after a mammoth 4 inches of snow, when the panic of impending starvation loomed like a slim line Damocles, the women in my family trudged off to the supermarket, tennis rackets under foot, with the intention of stockpiling enough bacon to see us through till August and the big thaw. Of course had they checked the chest freezer they would have found a bounty of frozen stuffs so vast it could have seen the Legions of the North through even the harshest of winters. In fact there’s enough bacon in there from the previous few years ice famines to line a rasher from here to Denmark.

It was after last years ‘Big Chill’ that I decided to clear out the freezer in question because I was sure most of the contents would be out of date, I was right. At first I thought Waitrose was bringing back vintage packaging, but it turned out the Salmon filets half way down actually were made in 2001. As I delved further still I found quiches whose labels were written in Olde English, Smileys that looked indifferent, and even a couple of three bird roasts from times of old. I began to question the point of freezing so much stuff in there if it would never get eaten; the answer, I found, was because the freezer is so large that it doesn’t operate efficiently unless it is full. So no sooner had I cleared out the food of the previous millennia, I had to fill it up with fresh goods that would inevitably get thrown away in a decade or so. Including plenty of bacon.

I still get on at my mother for buying too much food, however I fear it may be a losing battle. The ‘buy one get one free’ offers are largely responsible, or worse ‘buy two get one free’, because lets be honest you only needed one in the first place but a deal is almost impossible to shy away from. My dad’s the same, he recently brought two Brompton bicycles off EBay, having had his original bike stolen from the train. His logic was that this way he wouldn’t get too attached to either of them, but really it was the fact the second bike was extremely cheap – a good deal.

Is it perhaps a time for downsizing then? Mum is still shopping for six people, but very rarely are there more than three sitting down to eat. I’m in London for most of the week and with any financial luck hope to move down permanently in a month or so, my two younger sisters are in Gloucestershire and Africa respectively, my elder sister is dieting, or at least she was, and even the old girl herself only has a blended shake for breakfast, a disgusting cereal bar for lunch, and a glass of water for tea. Time I think to bid farewell to the freezer.

Ingredients: (Serves 4) 

2 packs of paneer, cut into 1” cubes (hard cottage cheese, available in the supermarket)

2 large tomatoes, chopped into chunks

1 red pepper, chopped into 1” bits

1 courgette, sliced

2 red onions, quartered

Juice of 2 lemons

2 tspns chilli powder

2 tspns amchur powder (mango powder)

2 tspns cumin powder

1 tspn garam masala

Salt and Pepper

Rapeseed oil

 Method:

1. Marinate / cover the paneer cubes in the spices and seasoning.

2. Make kebab skewers with the paneer, tomatoes, courgettes, onions and peppers. Brush the kebabs with the rapeseed oil and grill them over/under a high heat for a few minutes so the spices cook into the cheese, take them out and drizzle the lemon juice over them before returning to the grill for 10 minutes or until the vegetables are browned nicely.

3. Serve with rice and mango chutney. A winter warmer.