paneer

I promised this recipe post long ago, when I posted a photo of my paneer and butter on Facebook and had lots of interest from friends, wondering . . . what the hell is that stuff?

We have belonged to a milk co-op for about four and a half years.  We partner with an old-order Mennonite farmer in Kentucky, and about 8-12 families participate at any given time.  We take turns driving up there, visiting with Joseph, and bringing back milk, cream, and eggs.  It has been a phenomenal experience, and I'm so happy to be a part of it.  I love showing the kids the farm and the animals and where our food comes from.  Plus the drop point has been my backyard for the past few years, which makes it pretty easy for me.

The upshot, though, is that I pretty much always have a gallon of milk and a pint of cream waiting for me to do something.  We don't drink a ton of milk straight-up in my household.  Todd likes a glass here and there (he demands "fresh milk"), I like it in coffee.  But I get a gallon every week, rain or shine, and so I have had to get creative with how I use it up.

I skim the cream from the top of the gallon, combine it with my pint of cream, and make butter every week or two.  This has made me into a huge butter snob.  I only like my bright yellow butter now, and a lot of mornings the kids just have bread and butter and honey for breakfast.

I also make and freeze a lot of paneer.  I got super into making Indian food in the last couple of years.  It's pretty easy and it makes your house smell like exotic heaven.  Paneer is kind of the Indian equivalent to tofu.  It's a vegetarian protein staple that can pick up pretty much any flavor you combine it with.  Making it is an adventure in easy cheese-making:

Paneer . . . to the left, to the left.

Paneer
You will need milk, lemons, a big pot, a colander, cheesecloth (or an old clean pillowcase), a couple of plates, and some heavy cans.

Pour 8 cups of milk into a large pot.  Heat over medium until it begins to boil.  (This may take about twenty minutes - stir continuously near the end so it doesn't scald to the bottom.)

When it boils, pour in 1/4 C fresh lemon juice (no seeds! - you can also use bottled in a pinch).  The milk should begin to curdle immediately.  If it doesn't, add a little more lemon juice.

Drop the heat to low and stir the curds together gently for about five minutes.  You want to stir in such a way that you are sort of bringing them together, rather than smashing them apart.

Wet the cheesecloth and put it in the bottom of the colander.

Drain the curds into the lined colander.  Tie the ends of the cheesecloth together to make a little sack of curds.  Hang it from your kitchen faucet to drip for five minutes.

After the curds have drained five minutes, take the cheesecloth ball and twist it so that the ends are off to one side.  Place the ball on one plate, smash the ball down a little and put another plate on top of it.  Weight the top down with a couple of cans and let it drain for another twenty minutes or so.

Once the draining is over, remove the cheesecloth and dice the paneer into 1-inch cubes.  Use immediately or freeze for later!

How do I use it?  It's great in pretty much any Indian recipe!  Saag paneer, paneer tikka masala, and matar paneer are my favorites.  I will post a recipe for one of these in the next few days - this post already seemed too long and overwhelming!

zooming out

In yoga practice, the balancing poses usually occur sometime after the standing poses and flows in a vinyasa.  They come before we move to the floor and snake through stretches leading to savasana.  During the balancing poses (tree, dancer, bow, eagle), the teacher will often instruct us to focus our gaze on one point in the room; something that doesn't move.  (So, not yourself in the mirror.)  This focused gaze is called drishti in Sanskrit.  It's a place that you can send your thought and energy while you allow your body to balance itself.  Drishti is a necessity to maintaining poise and grace during the balancing poses.  It's also a powerful concept to apply to larger issues with balance in life.

I suffered a major setback in the last few months.  I was rejected for a doctoral program at Stanford.  It makes me feel like a real idiot to even write that, because . . . most people get rejected from Stanford.  There is nothing special about me that makes me different or unique because this happened to me.  There are a thousand idiosyncratic reasons this could have happened, and perhaps there is really just one salient reason:  I'm not qualified.

But it still just sucked.  Rejection is so unbelievably hard, especially because I tend to take others' dislike or indifference for me as a challenge to show them how much they secretly love and need me inside.  (Analyze that one for a little bit!)  I have a very hard time flouncing and detaching in these scenarios.  Rather, I tend to double down on convincing the party who rejected me that I'm actually the choice they want.  They just don't know it yet.  This kind of persistence has generally yielded great results in my life, but at significant personal and emotional cost.

When I shared about my experience of rejection from Stanford, my old friend Andy Piper popped up and reminded me of something I had shared with him during a challenging time in his life many years ago.  He said, "You once told me that in times of distress, you "zoom out."  I have thought about that nearly every single day since then."  Zooming out has indeed been my strategy of choice for escaping the pressure cooker.  It's like a release valve.  I picture myself floating up from the dense underbrush of whatever is entangling me.  I begin to see a pattern from the tree canopy.  As I get further away, I see that the dark tangle is just a little blip.  The forest is so beautiful and rich.  There are gorgeous areas just beyond whatever I was struggling with.  The way things are won't last forever - I can escape the dangerous endlessness that threatens to overwhelm me.

"Feeling are intimate, but not infinite."  My best friend Amanda shared this with me a few months ago.  Yes.  It's so true.  Finding perspective and zooming out, fixing your gaze, using drishti, is terribly challenging in times of disappointment and distress.  But it's a skill we have to cultivate if we are to maintain any kind of balance in the poses.