Please sir, I want samosas!

Here is a shout out to my cousin who suggested I make samosas, and to another friend who suggested I make something Vegan. While this is more vegetarian than vegan, this is a lot closer to vegan than my usual food. My feeling on samosas is that they are wonderful: A savory filling spiced with curry and then wrapped in a thin, and ideally home made, pastry dough. So of course, I opted to do this rather than purchasing filo dough, which was another option. Overall a good experience, there were lessons learned and I look forward to doing it again soon. Perhaps after a week of running.

The recipe came from http://www.samosa-recipe.com. With a URL like that it has to be good right? I aimed to find out this last Sunday, and I managed to do it all without leaving the house!

Here's most of the mise en place for the filling:

One potato,

One carrot (I used two since they were rather small ones)

An onion

Frozen peas (I couldn't believe we actually had a partial bag in the house)

Vegetable oil

Curry powder

 And here is the culprit that makes this dish not vegan - chicken stock. The recipe called for vegetable stock, but we had chicken stock on hand, frozen from the freezer. Here I am putting it over low heat for a bit to start the melting process.

 Next the veg needs to be diced finely. I think I did a pretty good job cutting potatoes into cubes here!

 I diced these up too.

I forgot to take pictures of a diced onion and garlic, but those ingredients are tossed into pan over medium high heat with some vegetable oil to brown up, then two teaspoons of the curry powder, or whatever spice you are using.  Already I could smell the potential of the dish. 

Things start to come together as you add the rest of the veg. I started off with the potatoes as I felt they might need a little more cooking down.

Then the carrots and a cup of frozen peas. This is tossed with some salt and pepper. I will strongly suggest that you err on the side of lightness of salting here for a number of reasons. The cooked down vegetables will have a more concentrated flavor than an initial taste will indicate, there will be salt in the pastry, and there's possibly salt in your stock. 

The recipe says to cover and simmer for half an hour, but I found 25 minutes to be more than enough. Though that may be due to my not quite airtight lid and cast iron pan combination.

Here is the goodness after its all done. 

Next comes the samosa pastry. I actually got fancy here and measured out the proscribed 225 grams of flour. That is approximately 1.8 cups of all purpose flour, or two cups with a few tablespoons pulled out might work just as well.

Put it into a bowl and drizzle in the two tablespoons of vegetable oil and a nice pour of warm water. This is more of an art, but you want it to just pull together into a firm, slightly tacky mass. 80 mils, which is maybe around 5-6 tablespoons of warm water.

Take the mass and give it a good kneading. I did this for about 5 minutes until it smoothed out.

 The finished product is then rolled into a ball and wrapped in plastic for half an hour.

And here we are, filling and pastry ready to be transformed into samosas. I recommend you make all of the samosas before beginning the frying process, which I did not. I was far too hungry to wait, and I thought that I'd be able to juggle making and frying at the same time. I was reasonably successful, but I think I would have been more successful being able to devote all of my time to the attention of each step.

Divide the dough in half, then divide each of those halves into 6 small balls.

 Which you must then roll into 15 cm circles.

 Trust me, for the first few, get a ruler, and perhaps keep these whole as a model for your next roll outs. I made a significantly smaller circle and the resulting samosa nugget will not be displayed on this blog.

Each circle of pastry is then cut in half. Then brush warm water onto the straight edge (a finger works fine)..

 And folded in half, pressing to create a seam. A fork makes the work speedy and attractive! I found that stuffing was easily done in a manner I will attempt to describe awkwardly here.

Keep the thumb inside the pastry like so, then pick up the cone with all your fingers, supporting it on your fingers, now palm up. You can take out your thumb and spoon in the mixture, and use your thumb to press it in! You can then lay it back on the cutting board to seal with the fork.

 Here are some of my rather clumsy samosas ready to be fried. So innocent and pure!

 Ah, well I believe my oil was a bit on the hot side, and don't forget that hot oil will continue to cook the samosa even after pulling them out. Plus with the juggling of duties it just wasn't the proper way to do things. So learn from me and definitely pay attention and err on the paler side of golden brown.

Still, I'm not going to complain at all about this attempt. The samosas were crisp, with a slightly chewy wrap that revealed a wonderfully soft and savory filling with an easy bite. An absolutely great appetizer to go with beer by the way.

All in all, I consider this a highly successful first shot at a recipe. I've learned a bit about the practice of seasoning, the importance of planning and enjoyed quite a delicious appetizer. It was a pretty great Sunday.

Thank you and please keep on following my adventures in cookery!

A kinda sorta Valentine's day post

Hello loyal Cast Iron Therapy followers, hope that your plans for Valentine's day are going well if you have them, and if you don't... well I'm right there with you! To heck with "Single people be bummed out day," I dub this Monday, "Single people go eat well, perhaps with friends, while at home to spite the service industry day." Perhaps that's a bit of a mouthful. Insert obvious joke here.

I haven't whipped up anything special just yet but here are a few notions from the past that come to mind. I've one selection that may do better for the romantic night in, and two more less romantically inclined who crave immediate unhealthy satisfaction.

First for the lovers, an oven baked fish, accompanied by roasted broccoli and orange rice - a pretty good combination. You have your protein, veg and starch, in a nice light ensemble of flavor.There is some wild salmon, but perhaps a more sustainable option would be fitting as well, not only as a good thing to do for our fisheries but to be a better symbol for your relationship.

And if you don't care for fish, well too bad, that's all I got for you lovers. You have significant others so cry to them about it. Now for the rest of us!

The Juicy Lucy is for many the best form of cheeseburger there is, and I for one would be hard pressed to argue with them. A hand formed patty filled with American cheese for that wonderful melty quality that can only be achieved by a processed cheese food. Sure, I love a high quality "not American" cheese as much as anyone else, but I will stand firm along with many in my conviction that American cheese is the way to go for an ideal hamburger. I stand with good company, as esteemed chef and owner of wd~50 Wylie Dufresne, in My Last Supper declares exactly the same thing. Granted he would prepare it a bit differently. 


I went into this dish with just a general idea, when I really should have looked up a recipe. I did form two patties and stuff it with a few good hunks of government issue American cheese (one of the better "brands" in my honest reckoning). And I think it turned out damn well for a first try, as you can see from how meltingly gooey it looks. And I'm not sure why the picture is angled that way either.

And finally no derisive Valentine's day post is complete without phallic imagery, so here is the Mexican hot dog, a hot dog wrapped in bacon and grilled (or fried) until the bacon adheres to the encased meat. They're also known as Sonoran-style hot dog. I was a bit too engrossed in putting these on a bun and eating it to take more pictures of them actually on the bun with all the fixings. 

I'm not really too sure what else to say about these things, other than the fact that they seem to be a pure distillation of everything savory I loved in my childhood. Bacon, hot dogs. Throw it on a bun with your favorite toppings, maybe some extra peppers and queso to contrast with the smoky saltiness of the meats and you've got yourself one delicious six to twelve inches of heaven. Anyway, this is a plate that hearkens back to simpler times when your biggest concern was when Transformers was on next.

And hey, I was single when I was 6 years old too! Have a great one foodies.

I want to turn this whole cake upside down.

Two evenings ago I had the sudden inspiration to make a pineapple upside down cake, inspired by the fact that we had some passable fresh pineapple that would have served, better in preparation rather than eaten fresh. So I took a look online and found this recipe by Verushka on allrecipes. 

Today I was disciplined and actually set up my mise en place. However, a number of other mistakes and substitutions were used which I don't think did the recipe justice.

Adapted from allrecipes:

Here we have:

3/4 cup of butter

3 eggs

3/4 a cup of pineapple puree (original recipe calls for pineapple juice)

A pineapple

2 tsp of baking powder

1/2 cup of white sugar

1 and a half cups of flour

3/4 a cup of brown sugar

and vanilla extract, which we need 1/2 a teaspoon of.

Handy tip! After taking the butter out of the paper, I put the paper and the pan I was using into the oven for a minute, then used the paper to grease the pan.

5 tablespoons of the butter is mixed with the brown sugar and 1/4 a cup of the pineapple juice.

It turned into this beautiful butter brown mass.

Which is then spread into your baking container. I was having reservations on the size of the pan here, thinking it was a bit shallow and I think I was right.

The remaining dry ingredients are mixed together.

And the eggs separated. Note that you only need two yolks, but all three of the whites.

The whites are beaten until stiff but not dry.

And the yolks are beaten til bright yellow, then mixed with the remaining wet ingredients, then combine with the flour.

Here's where I think things started to go a bit off. I think substituting puree for the juice created a denser batter than ideal. This required a bit more aggressive folding of the egg whites, which really isn't folding at all.

Next pour the mix onto the pineapples, ah wait let me do that.

Here it is. I believe the slices were cut a bit too thickly. I felt that since the bowl was so shallow I had better split the recipe, so I also used a ramekin for a mini pineapple upside down cake.

A bit of the brown sugar/butter/pineapple mix went into the bottom of this as well. And I also remembered to butter it!

Laid some slices on top and all around.

And some dried cranberries for color, as I didn't have any maraschino cherries handy.

Ready for the oven!

I wish this was more of an action shot, as in the right one my feeling that there was a bit much sugar lining the bottom seemed to be true, with lots of awesome bubbling sugar action. A deeper cake pan probably would have alleviated this, giving more surface area to absorb more of that goodness.

Still, the cakes made it through without any real disasters. Ten minutes to rest, then the plating.

The larger one came out like this, with a lot of the sugar still sticking to the pan.

The mini turned out much more well behaved.

Finally I decided not to waste, and scooped out the brown sugar as best I could and rearranged it on the large cake. It's like candy!

So lessons learned is that with some substitutions and winging it, I was able to avoid a trip to the grocery store with what I had on hand. I'm fairly confident I could do the same thing next time with greater success, by using a proper pan, and increasing the amount of pineapple puree to make up for its lower liquid content.

Happy eating everyone!