Tasty Samosas!

I have so many requests for my recipe for samosas, or people wanting to try them, buy them,.... but they just want them!!

Samosas are amazing tasty little things, packed with flavour in little triangles, very time consuming to make... but so worthwhile.  Well, I say time consuming, but I have just made 45 and it took me in total 3 hours.. so not too bad and the good thing about this triangle pastry, filled with vegetables and packed full of spices, is that they can be frozen and saved for another time (hence why i made 45!).

As a child I use to make these with my mum and we sat and made 100s.. but in those days we also made the pastry.  Now its so easy just to buy from large supermarkets or specialist Indian shops.  It just makes life a little bit easier when it comes to making samosas.

People think they are hard to make, but I don't think they they are.  They actual filling is as simple as you want to make it ( my recipe is below).  The hardest and most time consuming part is the actual folding and getting the technique right.  I will do my best to illustrate how to fold a samosa correctly!

When are samosas eaten? anytime is my suggestion!... they are normally eaten as a snack or a starter or if you're my husband, he would just have these as his dinner (he is a big fan).  They are generally eaten with a mint or coriander chutney or even a date and tamarind chutney.  Or of you want to keep it simple, and shop bought chilli sauce.

You've probably seen and eaten samosas which vary in size and filling, these all depend on where in world they originate from.  Everyone has a slight variation on what they put in the filling to what they make the pastry from.  You can also get sweet samosas or ones filled with fruit and nuts, which sound absolutely amazing.

I'm going to try and keep the recipe and method as simple as possible, so here goes and hope you enjoy making them.

Ingredients

Filling	Paste/Glue	Pastry
2 tbsp Sunflower Oil 4 large Potatoes (600g) 6 Carrots (450g) 400g Petits Pois Peas Large bunch of finely chopped Coriander 4 Green Chillies 2 inches fresh of Ginger 4 tbsp Garam Masala 3 tsp Salt 3 tsp Sugar Juice of 2 Lemons 1 tsp Turmeric	5 tbsp Plain Flour Warm Water Mix together to make a paste, which looks like white glue!	Shop bought spring roll pastry Which comes in big squares (30 per pack). I cut these to get 3 rectangles as per the below diagram. Or you can buy special samosa pastry from specialist Indian shops. or you could simply use filo pastry.

Method

First, chop the chillies and ginger and make it into a paste, which looks like this.

Next chop the potatoes and carrots in the 1cm cubes

Add the oil to a large deep pan, wait for it to heat and add the potatoes, carrots and peas.

Next add your coriander and mix well.

Add the green chilli and ginger paste, garam masala, salt, sugar and turmeric and mix well.

You need to ensure this is over a low to medium heat and don't cover the pan with a lid as you don't want the mixture to go soggy with the condensation inside the pan from the heat so leave it open, but you will need to make sure that you are mixing otherwise it will start to stick to the bottom of the pan.  Your mixture should look something like this:

Don't forget to taste, you can alter the heat by reducing or increasing the number of chillies that you use.

Once the potatoes and carrots are cooked, and you don't want them to be too soft, add the lemon juice.

Adding lemon juice too early will slow down the cooking process of the vegetables.

The mixture now needs to cool down.  You can mix it occasionally to ensure it cools down evenly.

Now for the folding

You can do this in two ways, the hard or easy way! so I will try my best to explain how to do this.

Here is an image of the harder option:

Here is a picture to the easy option

Here are my finished samosas, I made 45 in total, using the above ingredients.

I really hope you try to make these, they are amazingly tasty!