Buzz
Regardless of who you are or what you do for work, getting a meal ready can seem impossible. After a long day of recipe creation (or struggling with my tired brain), I’d prefer to munch on some cheese or skip dinner entirely than face the pile of dirty dishes. To combat my Weeknight Dinner Ennui, I spend a lot of time watching food TV and buying cookbooks, constantly on the hunt for something to break the monotony. Lately, no one does it better than Priya Krishna.
Priya Krishna’s incredible new cookbook, Indian-ish, has been the best investment I’ve made in a long while. Like all great cookbooks, it’s more than just a collection of recipes: it’s an introduction to Indian-American ingredients and techniques, a tribute to the microwave, a manifesto for homemade yogurt, and a heartfelt family story that’s both touching and hilarious. What truly sets it apart is its outstanding “cookability.” Many of the recipes come from Priya’s mom, Ritu, who balanced feeding a family of four—and hosting dinner parties—while working as a full-time airline software engineer. This means every dish in Indian-ish is quick, easy, and guaranteed to please—a must-have for any busy home cook.
If Instagram is anything to go by, the star of Indian-ish is Ritu’s saag feta, a brilliant twist on saag paneer that replaces the mild, bouncy paneer with chunks of briny feta, which adds a whole new flavor profile. The full recipe can be found in the book or here on Bon Appétit, and you can even watch Priya prepare it in the Bon Appétit test kitchen:
This swap truly delivers. Feta is not only easier to find, but it’s also saltier, tangier, and more flavorful than paneer, and the texture it creates when blended with the gravy is hard to beat. Like saag paneer, there are big, soft cheese chunks, but also pockets of half-melted feta scattered through the gravy. As with most recipes in this book, saag feta offers a fantastic effort-to-reward ratio: it comes together in about thirty minutes, including prep, and tastes so good it might make you rethink saag paneer forever. It certainly has for me.
One change I made from the book’s recipe was grinding my spices instead of adding them whole, as the original suggests. Unless you have a Vitamix (or something similar), I recommend you do the same; no matter how much I tried to purée with my stick blender, whole cardamom and coriander pods just wouldn’t break down. Other than that, my modifications were minor: more feta, more garlic, and extra lime in the gravy, plus a pinch of Aleppo pepper flakes (a mild, fruity ground red pepper) in the chhonk for added color and flavor. If you’ve never made chhonk, it’s a mix of whole and/or ground spices fried in oil or ghee and then drizzled over a dish to finish it off.
Here’s how simple it is to make saag feta: just fold cubed feta into a vibrant, flavor-packed spinach gravy...
...prepare the chhonk by frying whole cumin seeds and ground red pepper in ghee...
...then drizzle it generously over the dish. Serve alongside basmati rice, lime wedges, yogurt, and fresh cilantro. That’s all there is to it.
The best part? This brilliant swap extends far beyond saag paneer. Whether you stir it into a rich gravy or mix it with spiced vegetables, cubed feta delivers all the creamy goodness of paneer with an added punch of briny flavor. Personally, I think matar feta, feta tikka masala, and feta gobi sound incredible—and I’m eager to give them a try.
