Anna Jones' Sticky Green Bean & Chilli Paneer
Recently I was lucky enough to interview Anna Jones (ex-Fifteen, chef, stylist & writer) for The Pool to promote her second book, A Modern Way to Cook - which by the way is excellent. It's packed with really inspiring recipes with vegetables at the forefront without it being faddy health food or offputting to hardened meat eaters.
I'm not normally a recipe follower, but there are definitely a few in Anna's book that I've bookmarked to try and this Sticky Green Bean & Chilli Paneer was top of the list after a particularly indulgent weekend - the veggie goodness was calling.
It's a really simple recipe based on frying onion, garlic and dry Indian spices in coconut oil before adding lots of tomatoes, ginger and green beans, reducing down with water and then finishing by stirring in some paneer and final lemon, chilli and sea salt seasonings. I'm a huge fan of coconut oil, especially in Indian cooking (I use it for almost everything except for really Mediterranean dishes) and at the moment I'm using this nice one from rawCo. It has a much higher smoking point than a lot of fats and some studies have shown it to aid weight loss (but of course its still saturated fat):
Anna's recipe calls for either homemade paneer, which I've done before and is very simple yet satisfying to make but a tad time consuming, or to soak shop bought paneer for 5 mins before use to make it a bit softer. I did the latter. The other interesting thing about the recipe is that it uses honey to sweeten the curry - not something I've heard of before and worked really nicely with the lemon and chilli.
Happily, this recipe only takes around 30 minutes and you can't really go wrong with it. I served it with a mixture of quinoa and cauliflower rice that I had leftover from the weekend (you know how I feel about leftovers) and sauteed it off with mustard seeds, garlic and ginger.
It went down very well for a #meatfreemonday dinner - thanks Anna.