I cook Indian often, ever since I fell in love with a particularly ghee filled dal on an otherwise uninspiring thali plate and discovered the next day that I could recreate it perfectly for a third of the cost.

Indian is a fantastic cuisine, at least to my probably untrained palate, because I can make three dishes the first night, planning for leftovers, and then add a dish or two a night, and all of a sudden the week has passed with delicious meals every night that didn’t require too much thought.

This particular recent batch of Indian dishes have also had the uncharacteristic trait of being relatively quick to make. I started off on this latest Indian cooking bought with a half a head of cabbage that needed to be used up. This curried cabbage (adapted from somewhere on the internet that google does not want to reveal) has turned me into a cabbage lover:

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After coming across snippets and rumors about an unmelting grillable cheese on the interwebs for a while, I tried it in a salad on a beautiful patio on tourist trap Granville Island. It was called Halloumi, and it was good.

I started keeping an eye out for recipes and came across a few like
Sizzling Halloumi Cheese with Fava Beans, but I could never find the cheese, not even in the snooty $100 bread flown in every morning from France grocery store. Finally, on a long and failed mission which involved walking very far to a closed wine bar last Sunday, I stumbled across a Greek grocer, stumbled up to the cheese counter, and inquired. “You mean Haloom?, It’s in the refrigerator case”.

So I set out to make the Sizzling Halloumi Cheese with Fava Beans from Epicurious.com the next day, arriving home from the dayjob an hour late due to tracking down the fava beans. Luckily I was already planning on reducing the recipe to 4 servings, if not 2, from 6. Where the recipe calls for 1 1/4 lbs of fresh fava beans to turn into 10oz after shelling and peeling, I came out with 4 ounces. Luckily the recipe I was making for the weeks lunches at the same time had left over a bit of a package of baby spinach so I was able to improvise . . . and of course it was good, it was fried cheese!

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