SEOUL (AFP) – An unidentified person entered North Korea from the South on New Year’s Day, the military in Seoul said yesterday, a rare breach of the heavily fortified border between the neighbours.
Years of repression and poverty in North Korea have led more than 30,000 people to flee to the South in the decades since the Korean War, but crossings in the other direction are extremely rare.
The person was detected by surveillance equipment in the Demilitarised Zone – which divides the Korean peninsula – at 9.20pm local time on Saturday, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said. It sparked a search operation by the military, but to no avail.
“It was confirmed the person crossed the Military Demarcation Line into the North,” it added.
The person has not been identified yet, a JCS official told reporters, adding South Korean authorities sent a message to the North yesterday regarding the incident.
No unusual activity by the North Korean military has been detected, he said.
In 2020, North Korean troops shot dead and burned the body of a South Korean fisheries official Pyongyang said had illegally crossed the maritime border.
In the same year, a North Korean who had defected to the South three years earlier sneaked back across the heavily fortified border.
THE WASHINGTON POST – It’s used in the Impressionists’ sumptuous seas and skies, favoured by a depressed Picasso and a spendthrift Vermeer. Once more valuable than gold, ultramarine blue, now sold in its synthetic form, is so popular today it ranks just below whites and blacks in sales by top suppliers of paint for artists.
But if you’re a painter keen on “true blue”, you might want to rethink your next masterpiece. In our volatile, supply-chain-challenged world, sourcing ultramarine, along with a host of other blue pigments, has been difficult to impossible. The colour could be creating blue skies on canvases today, and – like cream cheese – be in short supply tomorrow.
Jumping straight into your “Rose Period” might not help, either.
A shortage of titanium dioxide, the pigment for titanium white and a fundamental ingredient in about a third of artist paints, also puts other colours at risk. And beyond paint, conservators are missing swabs and tissues to clean paintings. Artists have struggled with shipping delays on essential equipment like canvas and stretcher bars. But shortages of colour are more disconcerting – particularly when it comes to blue, the world’s calm and cool favourite colour, according to numerous surveys.
Earlier last year, paint companies feared they might run out of synthetic ultramarine when one of two main factories in France that supply the pigment for the colour stopped making it, and the other, unable to keep up with the resulting demand, restricted international exports.
And that’s not the only blue that has been scarce. AkzoNobel, a house-paint manufacturer based in the Netherlands, has reported difficulties sourcing the 50 to 60 ingredients needed to make a shade of blue used in its industrial coatings. Golden Artist Colours, a paint company in New York, noted the dearth of titanium white could limit the production of mixed blue paints, such as light phthalo blue and light ultramarine.
Samples of blue pigments in the Forbes Pigment Collection housed at the Straus Centre for Conservation and Technical Studies at Harvard Art Museums. PHOTOS: THE WASHINGTON POST‘Kajikazawa in Kai Province’, from the series ‘Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji’, by Hokusai, circa 1830-1832
The idea that blue paint could vanish entirely may seem absurd, but even the suggestion – made in headlines last fall – is enough to foment existential doom. It was once easy to forget that the colours we experience in art and in our daily lives are materials – designed, selected and transported physical goods. Today, the supply-chain crisis has snagged the stitches of our reality and revealed the seams.
“Something that people don’t think about is that everything is colored,” said Narayan Khandekar, curator of the Forbes Pigment Collection at Harvard Art Museums, which has more than 2,700 pigments. “A white wall is not just a white wall, it’s either a warm or cool white.
Even car tires – each car tire has probably six pounds of carbon black in it to make it black instead of latex milky white. There are pigments used everywhere, even in ways that we take for granted.”
Asked what they’d do without titanium white, Pete Cole, president of the paint manufacturer Gamblin Artists Colours in Portland, Oregon, said, “Our Earth would cease to rotate.”
Looking back on the past year, United States (US) paint companies describe chaos. John Polillo, operations vice president at Blick Art Materials, said it’s like nothing he has seen in four decades in the industry. He hoped the situation will improve by the spring, after celebration of the Lunar New Year in China. The holiday should slow production there and help alleviate shipping bottlenecks elsewhere, he said.
The strain on materials began with base ingredients. During February’s record-breaking freeze in Texas, major petrochemical plants shut down, leading to a shortage of resin, a plastic additive used in paint. Then, paint companies faced a shortage of flaxseed oil, which some have blamed on pandemic-induced health fads.
Eventually, colours started coming and going, seemingly at random. Golden Artist Colours said its popular, earthy quinacridone golds and browns have been discontinued. During a COVID-19 surge in India, the company couldn’t obtain quinacridone magenta and hansa yellow because the government had to reroute to hospitals all industrial oxygen normally used to produce those colours.
Artist paints are unique in that they feature highly concentrated pigments, made of elements and other ingredients sourced directly from the earth.
“If I if I sell you a tube of ‘burnt sienna’, that is honest burnt sienna, dug up out of the ground, burned in an oven,” Cole said. And that means there are no substitutions. One gramme of natural Tyrian purple pigment, for instance, takes 120 pounds of sea snails to create, so paint companies make a mixed, artificial hue instead.
It is this combination of hyper-specific pigments and a global trade network that makes artist paints uniquely vulnerable to supply-chain issues. “You have a constant flow of colour moving around the world,” Cole said. “You have mined pigments from Italy. You have cadmiums being made in places that are all hard to get to, like India and Brazil. You have modern pigments being made in Germany.”
A glancing look at some key works in art history reveals how paints and pigments function like a technology of vision. Monet’s rich yellow sunsets and landscapes could only be painted after the invention of cadmium yellow in the early 19th Century. Hokusai’s The Great Wave, and the rest of his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, wouldn’t have been possible without the then-recent arrival of Prussian blue ink in Japan. Losing access to a pigment is like losing a means of seeing.
Many famous artists have used blue in excess. A 20-something Picasso, beset by depression after a friend’s death, famously created more than 100 paintings during his Blue Period. The spiritually inclined abstract painter Yves Klein trademarked his own vivid International Klein Blue and used it almost exclusively, believing it was the best colour to use to paint “the void”.
Johannes Vermeer practically went broke for blue. Seeking a durable blue paint 300 years earlier, Vermeer would have been limited to natural ultramarine blue. (The cheaper, synthetic version wouldn’t be invented until 1826). Made from lapis lazuli – a semiprecious stone sourced from a remote river valley in Afghanistan – ultramarine was outrageously expensive, so most artists reserved the colour for special occasions, such as painting the ceiling of the Scrovegni and Sistine chapels.
But not Vermeer. The Dutch artist applied ultramarine to mundane scenes of ordinary people with the skill of a master and the self-restraint of a child. Ultramarine blue floods the shawl of Vermeer’s Girl With the Red Hat. It glistens above the soft face of the Girl With a Pearl Earring. In Woman Holding a Balance, the mountainous, ultramarine fabric on the table suggests a great expanse, as if the woman looks down into some mysterious elsewhere.
Coupled with his low productivity and poor business acumen, Vermeer’s love of ultramarine ultimately drove him and his family into debt.
After working on the 2016 exhibition “Infinite Blue”, Joan Cummins, curator of Asian art at the Brooklyn Museum, understands the role of international trade in creating works of art.
She noted that ultramarine blue appeared in Egyptian art thousands of years ago, despite having to be imported from Afghanistan. And she hypothesises that Titian, millennia later, might have been able to use so much ultramarine blue because his location in Venice put him in proximity to the first load that came off the ship.
Cole reasoned that ultramarine blue’s popularity today might have to do with its functionality.
“If you’re trying to paint the colours of the natural world, there are colours you struggle with and there are colours that practically do it for you – ultramarine blue is one of those colours,” he said. “It does its job so incredibly well.”
Another clue to blue’s popularity might be found in that long-sought-after “true blue”. Named for the long trip it took from Asia to reach the palettes of European painters, “ultramarine” derives from the Latin “beyond the sea”. At a time of pandemic-related physical restrictions, when good health is fickle and travel is fraught, we might find ourselves especially aching for blue.
“We associate (blue) with things that are big and limitless,” Cummins said. “I think a lot of people find it transporting.”
BEIJING (XINHUA) – China’s Internet sector registered robust growth in business revenue and profits in the first 11 months of 2021, serving as a key driver to shore up the country’s economic growth.
The business revenue of major Internet and related service companies in the country amounted to about CY1.42 trillion (about USD 222.7 billion) during the period, surging 22.3 per cent from a year ago, data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) showed.
Specifically, revenue from information services maintained rapid growth, thanks to the strong performance of audio and video service providers, online gaming firms, and news platforms.
From January to November, major internet and related service companies raked in a total of CY128 billion in profits, a 14.8-per-cent increase from the same period a year ago, MIIT data showed.
PARIS (AFP) – France will relax COVID isolation rules from today, the government announced, in a bid to ease their impact on society and the economy.
Fully vaccinated people who test positive will only have to isolate for seven days regardless of the coronavirus variant they were infected with, but can leave quarantine after five days if they show an antigen or negative PCR test.
There will be no quarantine for fully inoculated individuals who have a close contact test positive.
However, people must respect protective measures and “undergo regular testing”, Health Minister Olivier Veran said in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche.
Until now, those who tested positive in France had to isolate for 10 days with their close contracts also quarantined for a week.
The maximum isolation period could be up to 17 days – regardless of the variant – if a household contains a positive case.
The change in rules responds to the need “to take into account the extremely rapid evolution of the spread of the Omicron variant in France”.
It should allow a “benefit-risk balance aimed at ensuring the virus is controlled while maintaining socio-economic life”, said the Ministry of Health.
Additionally, “the first available virological data” showed “the incubation period of Omicron appears to be faster than previous variants, favouring a possible reduction in the length of isolation”.
Meanwhile, people who test positive for the virus – but who are not fully vaccinated – must complete a 10-day quarantine, according to the same rules, but shortened to seven should they present a positive antigen or negative PCR test.
THE WASHINGTON POST – There was a time expectant parents would deck out their nursery with a dedicated crib, changing table and rocker they had chosen just for baby. Things have changed, though. You can still incorporate safari animals, butterflies or a favourite Disney character in your child’s nursery – but these days instead of going wall-to-wall with themed decor interior designers and parents are looking for practical, stylish options that will evolve with children as they get older.
“It’s not as much about creating a scene for the room, but an experience that will allow them to transition throughout those first five years – at least,” said Kiyonda Powell, owner of a DC-based interior design studio.
If you want to create a kid’s room with longevity in mind, it’s best to leave the themed sets in the store, said Powell, who designed a room last year for her now 10-month-old son.
“When everything is so matchy-matchy, it makes it hard to switch things out and make it flexible over time.”
She suggested sprinkling characters or other kid-friendly themes throughout the room with throws, mobiles, rugs or teddy bears – things that can be changed easily and inexpensively over time.
If you’re looking for decor that will grow with the child, “art would definitely be something I would want to include”, Powell said. In her son’s room, an image of a Black boy holding a slingshot with perfect posture hovers over the crib. “I wanted to start an art collection for him, and I wanted to pick something that was really fearless,” she said.
Another thing to keep in mind: You don’t have to use colours traditionally associated with kids. For instance, black-and-white nurseries are trending right now, according to Byron Risdon of Byron Risdon LLC, an interior design studio in DC.
“That doesn’t seem very typical for kids or babies, but I think it’s very stylish and chic,” he said, adding that a more mature colour scheme won’t neglect the fact that it’s a child’s room. “There are certain elements that will always make it feel like a kid’s room, right? There’s this crib there – you’re definitely leaning in one direction.”
Need guidance for choosing essential furniture pieces – cribs, dressers, and chairs – that will grow with your child? Here’s what Powell and Risdon suggest, including specific product recommendations for each.
Choose a crib that can morph into a bed. Some convertible cribs turn into toddler beds, while others expand to twin and full sizes, Risdon said. “So it really can grow all the way into the teen years if you choose to hold on to it or use it for your next kid.”
Powell purchased a convertible bed made of wood and acrylic for her son. “The wood is soft enough so that when he’s moving around in there, he’s not going to hurt himself,” she said, adding that she would avoid cribs made of metal or other hard materials.
For style, Risdon recommended Lucite convertible cribs. “It’s just a step outside of the norm,” he said. The material is clear, so “it opens you up to playing around with colors and patterns” for other pieces of furniture in the room, because it will pair well with lots of different styles and finishes.
Consider function when selecting a dresser. If you look at a dresser for what it is – a functional piece of furniture to store items – you can “break the mould and get out of the whole like nursery feel,” Risdon said. “You can either buy a dresser that fits with the overall style of the room, or buy a vintage dresser.”
That’s exactly how Powell approached selecting her son’s first dresser. “It’s a vintage piece that I found secondhand and was very nostalgic to something that my grandmother used to have. So it wasn’t given to me, but it reminded me of something that was in the family.”
She recommended purchasing a low dresser instead of a full changing table, which baby will certainly outgrow. “You could convert dressers into changing tables on the top as needed,” Powell said.
One way to do this is by attaching large pieces of Velcro to the dresser and the four corners of the changing pad, then pressing the pad onto the dresser. You could also place a nonskid mat between the dresser and the pad to keep the pad from shifting. The simplest option is to find a changing pad that already has a sticky surface, then attach it to your dresser. In all cases, you may need to cut the pads or mats to fit your dresser’s dimensions.
And with any dresser or large piece of furniture in a child’s room, it’s important to anchor it to the wall to prevent tipping. You can purchase an anchoring kit to attach it. To baby-proof the drawers, try adhesive magnetic locks, tension rods, or safety strap locks.
Upgrade the traditional rocking chair. Instead of settling for a rocker for her son’s room, Powell purchased a recliner with a USB charging port. “You could sit there and charge your phone, play music, take a nap, rock and swivel,” she said. When your child gets older, they can sit in the chair and “pull out a book or do their homework with a laptop table”. Or you could use the chair elsewhere in your home.
For a nursery project with lots of space, Risdon purchased a chaise longue. “As a new parent, you can sleep on that,” he said. “And it’s something that you won’t feel like, ‘Well, I have to get rid of this. I don’t have a baby to rock to sleep anymore.’ If that room ever becomes a guest room, it’s just a nice chair to have for guests to relax on.”
For a chair that will last many years, Powell and Risdon advise purchasing performance fabrics, pretreated pieces and slipcovered furniture.
NEW YORK (AP) – The Los Angeles Clippers came to Brooklyn without their coach and many of their best players.
The Nets couldn’t convince themselves that LA’s patchwork lineup could beat them.
“I mean, it’s natural when a team is missing so many players. They’ve been going through so much over there and you relax,” Kevin Durant said. “You don’t think you could lose an NBA game like this.”
Brooklyn did.
Eric Bledsoe scored a season-high 27 points and the short-handed Clippers, playing on the second night of a back-to-back, rallied to beat the Nets 120-116 yesterday.
Terance Mann and Reggie Jackson added 19 points apiece for the Clippers, who were coached for the second straight night by assistant Brian Shaw with coach Tyronn Lue in health and safety protocols.
Los Angeles Clippers’ Eric Bledsoe shoots against the Brooklyn Nets. PHOTO: AP
They were missing much more than their coach. With Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and Nicolas Batum injured and Ivica Zubac and Luke Kennard in COVID-19 protocols, the Clippers were without much of what would be their normal starting lineup. They didn’t even play Marcus Morris Sr, who got the night off after scoring 20 points on Friday in a loss at Toronto.
But they were good enough to beat the Nets, who wasted James Harden’s seventh triple-double.
“It just shows our grit, it just shows what we’ve been through the last year and a half in terms of our next-man-up mentality and it just shows what we’re capable of, really,” Mann said.
Harden finished with 34 points, 13 assists and 12 rebounds. Durant added 28 points and nine rebounds, but the Nets fell to 0-2 since he returned from a three-game absence in health and safety protocols.
They surrendered 40 points in the fourth and coach Steve Nash said they got what they deserved. Durant echoed that, adding, “We came here with a (bad) attitude to start, thinking we were just going to walk into a ‘W’.”
The Nets routed the Clippers 124-108 without Durant in Los Angeles on Monday behind 39 points and 15 assists from Harden. But they couldn’t shake free after opening a series of double-digit leads in the second half.
The Clippers hung around and used a 15-3 run to turn a 12-point deficit into a 110-all tie on Amir Coffey’s three-pointer with 2:35 to play.
Harden’s free throw gave the Nets their last lead at 113-112 but Justise Winslow scored in the paint before Mann got wide open in the corner in front of his bench for a three-pointer that made it 117-113 with 23 seconds to play.
The Clippers went home with a 2-1 road trip, though wouldn’t celebrate too much. Shaw said they didn’t know what would happen next, knowing they have to test again before leaving and then again once they get home.
“We’re just going to enjoy it and then get ready for our next game on Monday when we get back,” Shaw said.
Street Kings, as the authorised retailer of New Era Cap, an American headwear company headquartered in Buffalo, New York and the exclusive cap supplier for Major League Baseball, offers the latest and dopest variety of caps fitting every lifestyle.
A cap paradise, it offers brands all the way from the United States (US) such as Mitchell and Ness as well as Goorin Bros. Apparels, jerseys and bags are also available at the store.
Currently, the store’s latest arrival – Goorin Bros The Farm Holiday 21 Collection – has been a hit since its release in the US.
Street Kings opened its doors for business at Bangunan Habza Kiulap in April 2017.
When the business grew, the store moved to a more spacious and strategic location at Impiana Complex Kiulap with its main brand New Era Cap, an international lifestyle brand with an authentic sports heritage dating back 100 years.
A view of the Street Kings store. PHOTO: LYNA MOHAMAD
MOSCOW (AFP) – Five people died and 21 were injured in a bus accident south of Moscow yesterday, Russian authorities said.
The Federal Road Traffic Inspection agency said the crash happened at 5.45am local time in the Ryazan region.
“As a result of the accident five people died. Twenty-one were injured,” the agency said on Telegram, adding that two of the injured were under-age.
It said the injuries were of “various severity”. The agency published photographs of the badly damaged coach, which hit a pillar under a railway bridge. The front of the bus appeared to be entirely crushed.
The driver was among the fatalities, and an Internet website belonging to the Russian Interior Ministry said he could have fallen asleep behind the wheel.
The accident took place on a highway near the village of Voslebovo 270 kilometres south of the capital, the agency said.
THE WASHINGTON POST – With representation comes pressure. Whenever a sometimes-marginalised community gets the chance to tell its story on screen, expectations can be high. India Sweets and Spices, which looks at an Indian American family, takes that expectation and turns it on its head, giving us a more nuanced, complicated, and problematic look at the people it’s about.
Written and directed by Geeta Malik, the film first introduces us to Alia Kapur (Sophia Ali of Grey’s Anatomy, the daughter of Indian immigrants Sheila and Ranjit (Manisha Koirala and Adil Hussain, both well-established names in Indian cinema).
Alia’s relationship with her parents is strained because she fits into just enough of their boxes to be successful, while missing just enough to be frustrating. For example: She’s an honours student at UCLA, but she doesn’t maintain her eyebrows and is outspoken about the sexism and classism she sees among her parents’ wealthy friends. When she returns home to suburban New Jersey for summer vacation, she’s subject to Jane Austen-esque parties, all of which blend together. The same people gossip about the same things – mostly who’s married whom, and when – while subtly trying to outshine one another with their own polished perfection.
Once, while on a trip to the local Indian market, Alia spots an attractive young man, Varun Dutta (Rish Shah), and, to get to know him better, invites him and his parents – who own the market – to a family party. It’s a minor scandal because the working class Duttas don’t fit in with the Kapurs and their wealthy circle. It becomes even more scandalous when Varun’s mother (Deepti Gupta) turns out to know Alia’s mom from India, and harbours more than a few secrets about her.
It would have been easy for the filmmaker to make Alia the woke, Americanised hero of this story, but Malik wisely avoids that trap, at first subtly, and then more overtly. Alia eventually learns that the appearance of her parents’ lives is more nuanced than she thought. But Malik also reveals that Alia is completely unaware of her own privilege and how it affects others.
Rish Shah and Sophia Ali in ‘India Sweets and Spices’. PHOTO: THE WASHINGTON POST
When she invites the Duttas, it never occurs to her that the invitation might make them uncomfortable, as well. (They feel obligated to accept, and then feel out of place when they arrive). As much as Alia chafes against the rules of her world, she also knows how to navigate them, and she’s thrown off balance when others don’t. Unfortunately, such sharp subtlety doesn’t carry through the entire movie. While the major characters are written and performed with beauty and complexity – particularly by Koirala as Alia’s mother – the minor characters are more broadly drawn.
Revelations about them, for instance, don’t feel particularly, er, revelatory. Most of the twists and turns are relatively predictable, delivering a light buzz rather than an intense shock.
It’s not my place, as an outsider, to comment on the authenticity of India Sweets and Spices. But Malik has created a world that feels very real, ably communicating its occasionally frustrating and deceptively complex contours. There are some good laughs to be had, some good lessons to be learned and room to discuss the importance of being allowed to be imperfect.
THE WASHINGTON POST – Here’s the best kind of cookbook moment: You open it, you see a recipe so appealing you have to make it, you try it, you love it, you add it to your repertoire.
Sometimes the dish is something you already know – maybe you’ve had it in restaurants many times but never thought you could (easily) make it (well) at home, and the recipe proves you wrong. Or sometimes it’s something you’ve never heard of, but wish you had, and making the recipe just confirms that feeling.
For me, this wonderfully simple path to butter paneer is a little bit of both, but also kind of neither.
I had heard of butter paneer but never tried it, even though my husband and I eat Indian food at least once a week.
At our favourite two places, his go-to to-go order (say that five times fast) is butter chicken, mine dal makhani. I’ve ordered saag paneer plenty of times, and paneer korma, too, but even though butter paneer is a popular restaurant dish, I’ve never seen it on the menu at these spots, even under its aliases paneer makhani and paneer butter masala.
Simple butter paneer. PHOTO: THE WASHINGTON POST
This probably means I need to broaden my list of regular Indian takeout spots.
Now that Vina Patel has taught me how to make the dish, thanks to her cookbook From Gujarat With Love, do I even need to order it from a restaurant?
Probably not. Cooking it at home is just a matter of pureeing cashews with water, then simmering pan-fried paneer cubes in a sauce of the cashews, tomato puree, spices, butter and a touch of cream.
The sauce is nothing short of beautiful, a perfect marriage of complex flavours that dance on your tongue. And even though the dish didn’t originate in Gujarat, the western Indian state where Patel is from, it shows off one of the principles of Gujarati cooking: “Our food is spicy, sweet and sour,” Patel said in a phone interview from her home in Saratoga, California. “We add sugar into each and every dish, and it really balances out the sour taste.”
In this case, it’s just a teaspoon, and even though I know I’ll hear about it from readers who hate to see even a pinch in anything, I stand by its place in this sauce.
If you’re skeptical, make the sauce without it, taste, then add the sugar and taste the difference. I think you’ll agree, but if you don’t, you know what to do next time.
Ultimately, when you make anything yourself, you can customise, of course.
That means vegan butter and a non-dairy cream alternative, if you follow a strictly plant-based diet, but what about the main ingredient?
When I asked Patel about substituting extra-firm tofu for the paneer, she tried it herself and reported that, while she doesn’t like it nearly as well as the paneer, it’s certainly suitable for any vegan cooks. Try asking for that in a restaurant!
Simple Butter Paneer
This popular restaurant dish, sometimes called paneer butter masala or paneer makhani, uses cashews and tomatoes to enrobe the Indian cheese cubes in a rich, gently spiced sauce. It employs three kinds of dairy, but you can use tofu, vegan butter and nondairy cream alternative if you’d like. Serve with flatbread or rice.
INGREDIENTS
FOR THE CASHEW PUREE
½ cup raw cashews
½ cup boiling water
FOR THE PANEER
Four tablespoons unsalted butter (may substitute vegan butter), divided
Eight ounces paneer, cut into one-inch cubes (may substitute extra-firm tofu, drained and patted dry)
Two cups tomato puree
¾ teaspoon chili powder
½ teaspoon garam masala
½ teaspoon paprika
One cup water
One teaspoon granulated sugar
Three tablespoons heavy cream (may substitute nondairy cream alternative, such as Silk brand)
½ teaspoon fine sea salt or table salt, plus more to taste
One teaspoon coarsely grated fresh ginger (optional)
Five slices red chile (optional)
DIRECTIONS
Make the cashew puree: In a small bowl, combine the cashews and hot water. Let soak for 30 minutes, then transfer the mixture to a blender or mini food processor and puree until smooth.
Make the paneer: In a medium nonstick pan over medium heat, melt one tablespoon of the butter. Add the paneer and cook, turning the cubes occasionally, until light golden brown on at least two sides, five to seven minutes. Transfer to a small bowl.
Add the remaining three table-spoons of butter to the pan, and once it melts add the cashew puree. Cook, stirring, until the mixture is incorporated, then stir in the tomato puree, chili powder, garam masala and paprika. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture thickens, one to two minutes.
Stir in the water and add the paneer. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture darkens and oil rises to the surface, five to seven minutes. (You might want to use a splatter guard here, as the bubbles tend to spit). Stir in the sugar, cream and salt and cook just until the mixture is incorporated and heated through, 30 seconds. Taste, and season with more salt, if needed.
Garnish with ginger and chile slices, if using, and serve warm.
