A beginning and a failure

I am totally out of food. Despite having spent 150$ in the past few days on groceries, I have nothing to eat in my kitchen. The reason is that most of my purchases were canned goods or dried fruits and nuts. I have enough food to last me for more than a year. In fact, after carrying like 100 pounds of cans home from the associated supermarket, I may be laid up in bed for a year with back problems.
Anyway, I'm going to start to write since my friends Jarid and Sarah (whose apartment I had dinner at last night) convinced me its worth posting some recipes and failures.
Of failures I must relate my attempt to make Paneer (indian cheese). My sister-in-law Lori showed me the basic steps a few weekends ago. Essentially you slowly boil whole milk and right as it is starting to boil you denature it with lemon juice (or lime juice or vinegar). This causes the, already excited and likely unfolder proteins to denature even more and form a mesh with the fat in the milk --- essentially forming curds. Then you drain and wash away the acid, leaving just the curds. The curds are wet and need to be squeezed of their water and then pressed into a block for frying.
My first attempt was precipitated by a purchase of 1.5 pounds of Jareslburg cheese I got for 4 bucks at the east village cheese shop. The cheese was starting to go, and I had too much left, so I figured I would use non-fat powder milk and melt the cheese into it to create my own version of whole milk. Well I did this, but the cheese didn't really go into any solution. All the seemed to happen was that all of its flavorful oils left it. I was left with a very pale, stringy piece of cheese, with a similar feeling to mozzarella cheese. Nothing like paneer at all. I ended up just throwing it in with some white beans, garlic, basil, pine nuts and pasta mixture I made the next day.
My second attempt was less of a failure at first glance. I got proper whole milk and created the curds. They were not as big as Lori's and I didn't have a proper device to drain such small curds. I ended up using a slash guard to drain and wash the curds. This process ended up costing me a lot of the curds and I was left with a fist full of curds. Then I tried to squeeze them with a kitchen towel, but the knit was not tight enough and som curds squeezed out. Finally I pressed the remaining amount of curds and tried to fry it in my small cast iron. The result was a mush of cheese and oil, plus a bunch of stuck burnt cheese. I threw all this into a cauliflower, peas and cashews mixture I made in a spicy indian tomato sauce. The final product was fine, but the cheese had no real positive impact on the dish, and had wasted over an hour of my time. Next time I want to add cheese I'll either get farmers cheese from the cheese shop, or go to the indian store and get proper paneer.