Paneer Burji

Events happening in faraway Australia and New Zealand have shortened my day to fewer hours, I must admit. Ever since the ICC Cricket World Cup matcheshave started, I am spending most part of the day watching them, sometimes live, most times rerun or highlights. Thus my day has shrunk, so to put it. I try to quickly cook stuff to put on the table, come up with easy and simple dishes for our dinner.
When I was away in India, the organic milk pack my husband had purchased, went stale and the milk had curdled while he boiled it. He kept aside the rest of the packs and I made some paneer with the milk. With low fat / skimmed milk the paneer is not so much of milk solids and tends to be more crumbly. I planned to use the paneer in as many ways as possible. I made paneer burji so I can have it as a side dish or stuff it in my dosas as paneer dosa.
Burji with paneer is scrambled cottage cheese with other vegetables and condiments. This delightfully spicy and delicious dish is often paired as a side dish for parathas, paav and rotis. It can be had as sandwich with bread or rolled as filling in dosas, wraps and few more possible ways to consume this.
Vegetables, onions and spices are generously used to make it spicy and irresistible. There is not much to the recipe as such and you can let your imagination and make this more innovative.

Paneer Burji - Scrambled Cottage Cheese with Vegetables and Spices

Ingredients:
Serves 4 people
2 cups crumbled paneer / cottage cheese
2 large red onions sliced
Few medium coloured bell peppers cut
1 carrot sliced fine
1 cup chopped tomatoes
3-4 green chillis chopped very fine
11/2" ginger minced
5 pods of garlic minced
2 tablespoons Oil
1 table spoon softened butter
Salt to taste
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
2 teaspoons red chilli powder
1 teaspoon garam masala powder

Method:
Crumble the paneer and keep ready.
Heat the oil and butter in a shallow pan. Add the cumin seeds and sauté for few seconds then add the chopped green chillis. Toss until the chillis are well coated in the fat.
Add the minced ginger and sliced onions. Cook until the onions are pink and translucent. Then add the garlic. Cook on low fire to remove the raw taste of the garlic.
Put in the tomatoes, chilli powder, salt and the garam masala powder. Cook to pulp the tomatoes.
Meanwhile in another pan heat some oil and cook the coloured peppers. When the soften a bit, still retaining their crunch, add them to the mix above.
Cook until the mixture is almost dry and add the crumbled paneer to it.
Keep tossing on a low fire until they all come together in a scrambled mixture with some moisture retained in it.
Paneer burji is ready to serve.

 

Serve with rotis, phulkas, paav or bread.
 I made an extra batch of this for the two of us. I tried it for a filling in my patties which eventually worked well in my burger too.