Christina is a good friend of mine. I met her when I was still new to Vegas. We hung out in similar circles, and I always thought she was a pretty cool chick… but I never really hung out with her. It has only been in the past year or so that I’ve spent any real time with her (and discovered that my initial impression was right, she really is a pretty cool chick!).
I was telling her about my blogging adventure, and my ideas for Pocket Week…. and that I wanted to include all kinds of pockets (even unconventional ones). When she told me about Samosas (and then offered to write it up as a guest post) I was super excited! Take it away Christina…
I was telling her about my blogging adventure, and my ideas for Pocket Week…. and that I wanted to include all kinds of pockets (even unconventional ones). When she told me about Samosas (and then offered to write it up as a guest post) I was super excited! Take it away Christina…
I am a huge fan of Indian cuisine. One day, I decided I wanted curry – a real curry. I couldn’t find what I wanted in my recipe menagerie. Usually, I’d search the Internet for a good one, but I had a secret resource. My sister-in-law is Indian, so I called her up for a good recipe.
Instead of just one recipe, I got an entire cookbook: “Authenic Recipes from India ,” by Brinder Narula, Vijendra Singh, Sanjay Mulkani and Thomas John. Not only does this book have amazing, authentic recipes, but an index of the different spices and base sauces and a mail-order list of where to get them.
So what does all this have to do with pockets?
The book had a recipe for samosas, the wonderful Indian pockets of yuminess.
Maybe it was the foreign ingredients, or maybe it was the wonderful quality of the restaurant samosas I’d had in the past, but I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to pull this together. To my relief, it was amazingly simple.
Here’s the recipe:
Dough
7 TBS (100 g) ghee or butter
2 c (250 g) flour
½ tsp carom seeds
½ tsp salt
2/3 c (150 ml) water
Filling
8 oz (250 g) potatoes
2 TBS oil
½ tsp cumin seeds
1/3 c (50 g) cooked peas
½ tsp salt
1 tsp ground coriander
½ tsp ground tumeric
½ tsp ground red pepper
1 green chili, deseeded and minced
1 tsp dried mango powder
Knead the ghee/butter into the flour until crumbly. Mix in the carom seeds and salt, then gradually add the water to make dough. Leave for 30 minutes, covered with a damp cloth.
Boil the potatoes and cut into small cubes. Heat the oil and stir-fry the cumin seeds for a minute or until they crackle. Add the remaining filling ingredients and stir-fry for 1 minute. Set aside to cool.
Roll out the dough and cut into 3” circles. The tricky part was getting the dough thin, but not too thin. Cut each circle in half. Place a spoonful of filling in the center of a semi-circle and fold into a pocket. Seal the edges firmly.
Heat oil in a wok and deep-fry the samosas for about 5 minutes, until golden brown. I didn’t deep-fry mine, but pan-fried them. They still came out delicious.
The samosas are on the left in the photo. They were the side for some fantastic chicken tikka – even if it’s not the traditional red.
Thanks, Christina! These look super-yummy!
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