Home Made Samosas (you read that right!)

Last Saturday, waking up rather late (9:30ish) after having spent the previous night drinking mineral water and nibbling on water biscuits while watching the Bolshoi on the educational channel, I turned on Tyler Florence's Ultimate cooking show. His stuff is usually a bit too-many-ingredienty for me. That day he was making the rather unimaginatively named "Tyler's Ultimate Indian Dinner." He made lamb curry and some other stuff but the samosas looked easy and had the intriguing element of making your own dough. It couldn't have been easier, in the food processor you just add 2 cups of flour, a half teaspoon of salt, and six tablespoons of oil. Turn on the pastry blade and slowly add six tablespoons of warm water until the dough balls up. Easy. Put it in the fridge for half an hour and then you're good to go. I made it early in the after noon and assumed it would keep until that night. When I returned from the ballet at around 10, I rather ambitiously got out the dough and found that it had sort of hardened and dried out and was unusable. I wasn't too bummed. It was easy enough to make and I started again the next day. Getting the dough to roll out thinly enough was a bit of a challenge. I don't know about you, but I don't have a whole lot of rolling pin work under my belt. Anway, you roll it out and make semi-circles of the dough, run the seam with some water so it sticks, and pack them with the filling. Oh yeah, the filling. Most of the spices I already had but when I went to the store for the ground chicken it called for I had to grab some cinnamon. I'm not gonna go into all the details of the filling. You can get it here. I did sort of scorch the spices in the oil rather than cook them. I thought I was sunk but I guess I got them off the heat in time. At any rate, you end up with the classic stuffed triangle shape. Fried them in oil at 350 F after returning from Myerhoff that evening. Why no picture of the process? I totally spaced and didn't even THINK to document until I got to work with ........




To the right you can see the red Indian Relish I got from Trader Joe's. Love that store. It's owned by a German company and they know how to bring the variety and quality of a high-street supermarket to the masses at fantastic prices. No offense Harris Teeter, I'm just sayin..... The weird looking white stuff to the right is the dipping sauce that I also whipped together. What's it called again? Lomash? Limon? Limahl? Uh, no, that was that goof from Kajagoogoo...... Wait, not even close, it's called Raita.

There's that weird cockney rhyming slang thing they do in London where they refer to something not by a word that sounds like it, but rather, to a word that is connected to a word that sounds like it. To wit: in an Indian restaurant in White Chapel, a local might ask for a serving of "Paperback." Now, this is the silly part. Since "raita" sounds an awful lot like "writer", especially when spoken with the soft-on-the-r-sound accent of the English, the person in question has made the association with the famous Beatles song, "Paperback Writer." So instead of being all dull and simply asking for what he wants, he's made the sound association between the two words and is now asking for "Paperback raita." Get it? Another example. When someone lies, like, say, they claimed to have spent the evening at the opera when instead, and you know this for a fact, they spent it at the local pool hall talking nonsense. A cockney rhyming slanger might accuse them of "Tellin' porkies." The association here? Lies-pies-pork pies- porkies......

Since I took three photos of my samosas, I'm posting three photos of my samosas. They were fantastic. Literally as good as the ones from the "Indian Garden" down the street. You know the one, appropriately set above the aptly named "Thrive" yoga studio.