42 min
Vegetarian · India
Matar Paneer
A one-pot Vegetarian recipe with India flavors, built for busy weeknights when you want real food without a…
By Ingredient · 1 recipes
42 min
Paneer: One-Pot Weeknight Recipes
1 tested one-pot weeknight recipes that use paneer. Use up what's in the fridge, build a meal plan around what's on sale, or answer the eternal question: what can I make with the paneer I bought and forgot about?
42 min
Spice & Simmer keeps 1 recipe that call for paneer on hand. This page exists so that when you find paneer in your fridge, your cart, or on sale at the store, you can walk straight to a real one-pot weeknight dinner instead of staring at a generic search results page.
Where Paneer fits on a weeknight
In our library, paneer shows up most often in Vegetarian dishes — a good signal of where it tends to feel most at home on a weeknight plate. You will see it lean into India recipes more than any other tradition, though the ingredient travels well across cuisines. And it pairs naturally with the Skillet & One-Pan technique — that's the cook method most of these recipes use.
How we use paneer
Every recipe in this collection treats paneer as a real ingredient with a job to do — never as filler, never as a garnish that you could leave out without anyone noticing. We tested each recipe with the ingredient at the center of the dish, swapped substitutions only where they clearly worked, and noted the ones where paneer is genuinely the star versus the ones where it's part of an ensemble.
If you bought paneer for one specific recipe and have leftovers, scan the cards above for a second use — most of these dinners are designed to clear out a half-used package on the second night, which is the quiet superpower of cooking from an ingredient list rather than a meal-plan list.
Top categories that use paneer
Vegetarian (1)
Top cuisines that use paneer
India (1)
Top cook methods that use paneer
skillet (1)
Shopping & storage notes
Buy paneer when it looks fresh and in season — that's when it's cheapest and tastes the most like itself. For weeknight cooks, the most useful skill is portioning at the moment you bring it home: split the package into recipe-sized portions, label and freeze what you won't use this week, and you've removed the single biggest blocker to cooking from your fridge instead of from a takeout menu. The recipes above are all designed to use a normal portion of paneer — no oddly large or specialty quantities.
From here, you can browse every ingredient in the library, jump to cook methods, or filter to dinners ready in 30 minutes or less.