Happy Diwali! I'm out of paneer!

Yesterday, I braved parking lot peril and Oak Tree Road traffic jams because I forgot that this is the last weekend before the five-day Diwali celebration begins on Nov. 2. I didn't turn back from the crowds who were collecting essentials for this most important Hindu festival; I was out of paneer, which I always keep in my freezer for quick meals.

Patel Brothers, a chain whose newer, larger Iselin store is a chic location whose banner reads "Celebrating our food...our culture," is my preferred store for South Asian ingredients. It seemed brighter than usual with assorted lights and lanterns, and colorful decorations for Deepavali strung from high places. I felt happy to be in the energy of so many people shopping for celebration. But I just needed cheese, and I got in and out as quickly as possible so someone else could park and get into the store.

Paneer cheese is a culinary carrier. It doesn't melt, and so it brings toothsome, rich, unsalted substance to any sauce or combination of spices to which it is introduced. Contributing more texture than flavor, it is simply mild-mannered pressed cheese curds, and many cooks make it at home.

Paneer cheese has been one of my favorite foods since one fall day in the early 1990s when my Louisiana cousin, freshly acculturated by a move to New York City, walked me all around the East Village looking for a certain Indian restaurant.

Being a Southerner, she brought with her a love of all things fried, and she wanted me to try this restaurant's banana pakora, chunks of ripe banana battered to form round fritters.

My go-to paneer isn't sold everywhere. But I would be captivated by the flavor of the dishes -- spicy ones like chicken tikka masala or the  fascinating, vibrant orange of tandoori chicken, or mutter/mater (peas) paneer or palak (spinach) paneer or paneer pakoras or anything that involved the soft, fresh cheese.

Being a modestly paid young journalist, I also appreciated the prices, driven down by intense competition among the more than two dozen restaurants serving Indian food on a block of East 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues.  I visited the area and my cousin often, but living in Pennsylvania at the time, getting to those restaurants required a drive that without fail would involve at least an hour's crawl in traffic along the approach to the Holland Tunnel and $4 in toll (I didn't know then that those were the days!)

I tried many times without success to recreate those flavors -- especially chicken tikka masala and the well-seasoned lamb kabobs of Pakistan. As a young adult excited by unfamiliar ingredients, I was not yet familiar with coriander seeds or fresh ginger or curry leaves or cilantro or cardamom pods or fenugreek or many of the other seasonings that were essential in the dishes I enjoyed.   

When my life's path led to New Jersey, I sought out Indian restaurants, and those serving other ethnic cuisines that were so sorely missing from my small Pennsylvania city. With the move, I would encounter higher levels of South Asian cooking -- costlier dishes made with all fresh ingredients, expertly blended spices and touches of cream. I could also traipse around markets in Iselin, Jersey City and other areas to buy and experiment with ingredients. Other shoppers were kind and patient enough to chat about how they used vegetables, spices and condiments that were unfamiliar to me. The "world wide web"  made so much research possible.

When I started working on a daily newspaper's food section, many cookbooks came my way, further explaining the importance of layering Indian and other South Asian spices and seasonings that I could happily find with ease. In those days, there were no chefs or cooks from India or the region on the young TV Food Network, and it would be years before I'd have a chance to interview heart-throb chef, television personality and cookbook author Vikas Chana, or discover Sanjeev Kapoor on YouTube, or be drawn in by the infectious enthusiasm of VahChef, and the motherly kitchen wisdom of Mandula.

One of my all-time favorite cookbooks is a more recent one, "Chetna Makan's Healthy Indian Vegetarian." With her recipes,  I was able for the first time to cook dishes that satisfied me as much as those I'd get in a restaurant. Makan's discussion of ingredients and cooking techniques were key, but she also advised when a shortcut would not compromise the end result of a dish.

And so it was with thoughts of one of Makan's recipes -- my often-cooked, comfort food blend of soft-cooked canned kidney beans with tomatoes and paneer -- that I recently approached a recipe for paneer tacos with cranberry chutney on the India-focused website of the Cranberry Marketing Committee. The organization's Delhi-based arm selected the recipe.  

I liked the idea of cranberry-date chutney, but I wanted to use fresh cranberries instead of dried. I had also hoped to streamline for print a recipe that was presented in three parts. But I could not get it to where I wanted it in time.

The Kasmiri chile powder that I use often -- first purchased at Makan's suggestion --  was too present and seemed chalky in the sweet cranberry chutney, but it worked well to add a kick to the paneer filling. The sauce was, nevertheless, a fine complement to tame the well-spiced paneer tacos. So I looked around at other recipes and came across one from Makan that uses red onions, which I added to our take on the recipe.

I stayed with dates as a sweetener, rather than the jaggery Makan used in her onion chutney. (I don't use sugar outside of baking, so my chunks of jaggery have been in the cabinet for more than a year...)  

As a time saver, we did not marinate the paneer before adding it to the sauce. Instead we heated all the seasonings as an early step. In the original recipe, some spices were added to the sauce at the end of cooking. We have learned that spices are more present in a dish if they are exposed to heat, which toasts them and releases their flavorful and aromatic oils. However, stirring the cheese in at the end of cooking -- rather than cooking it with the tomatoes -- also preserved the cubed shape of the cheese. In previous tests, it cooked to pieces in the tomato sauce.

Here's what we came up with: Cranberry-date chutney with red onions for paneer cheese roti tacos