Let's stuff these samosas!

I probably don't need to tell you what a samosa is. They're so famous that even M&S sell them. But what you probably don't know is how far young Indu would sink in her seat when Momma Kumar would say "should we make samosas on the weekend?". 
Let's make three things clear before I start:

 1) When Mum asked IF we should make samosas over the weekend it was not a suggestion. She was just giving me a heads up.
2) My place in the samosa factory line was a given. and I was not happy about it.
3) The samosas would take over the entire weekend. Mum would remind me not to make plans for the weekend. then we would make them. Then we would spend most of the weekend eating them.

 To begin with we'd argue which samosas to make, minced lamb or potato. Even though we both knew that we'd end up making both. We had already got our aprons on so we may as well do it properly.

I can hear you asking "my god! why don't you just buy them from the shop?!" and it is a fair point. The shop bought potato ones are not so bad -if you know where to go. But I will tell you what my mother told me all the time growing up: You never know what they put inside the meat ones. Given the massive horse meat scandal my mothers words are oddly prophetic!
 

Store bought vegetable samosas. Perfect to eat in the car ride from uni!

Chicken Samosa from my friend's henna party. Definitely not my favourite kind of Samosa.

That is the reason we made samosas at home. Though I have a sneaky feeling that there were other things going on in our samosa weekends. After the initial reluctance I quite enjoyed making samosas with my mum (granted she did most of it), but I remember her laughing, talking to me about making samosas with her mother.

My mum is one of four sisters and she tells this one anecdote about making the samosas for the wedding reception of her eldest sister. I remember my mothers doughy hands sealing the samosas while she told me how they made HUNDREDS of samosas for my aunts wedding. And how they were tired and how her mother ran the kitchen and everything went off without a hitch. and she took the most pride in telling me how wonderful it was to watch everyone eat the samosas they made at home.

The memory of making samosas with my is one of my favourite childhood memories. Looking back, my father and brother would conveniently disappear when we made then and reappear when they heard them sizzling in the oil. Cheeky. Nevertheless, it felt like a good days work when we counted up all the samosas we made, placed them carefully in the freezer.  We put aside the ones we would have for lunch that day.

Samosas are great! You can enjoy them anywhere...
Piping hot samosas from a roadside cafe, passed around the family, going from New Delhi to Punjab. Or having a sneaky one in the car before you take them home, carefully balancing the chutney on the armrest.  And meandering through the shopping district in Punjab, samosa in hand,  taking quick hot bites because you've seen a saree that needs closer inspection...
But my favourite samosa memory is one that is repeated often. Samosas are delivered to the table at my aunts house. Everybody smiles and politely takes one samosa. you break open your samosa and either rejoice at having picked a lamb samosa (they're always so much better) or you quickly gobble up the potato one so you have another go at getting a lamb one. Like the Karela, homemade samosas are prestigious. Someone is sharing their time, effort and love with you.

please excuse the dopey expression!

How to spend Easter weekend making Samosas:
First, tell your parents you won't be coming home for the holidays. They will try to ply you with promises of lamb curry, shopping trips and your weight in Easter eggs.

Second, make samosas Saturday night, video call everybody so they can see you are making them from scratch (play it cool) and then fry them on Sunday. You are too tired to eat on Saturday night.

Finally, make Aloo Tikki (potato cakes) from the leftover filling. coax/guilt/threaten your flatmate to make chickpeas to go along with the samosas and then FEAST.


The ultimate test for me was to make my very own samosas from scratch. It is not a task for the faint hearted and you can't give up half way. So spurred on by the instructions from my mother and holding my trusty potato peeler I began.

Filling

I'll talk you through the process with the photographs I took. I took visual evidence because I don't think anyone would believe me otherwise. 

So first I made the filling. My mother told me what went in the filling but otherwise everything else was done from childhood memory. 

Boil some potatoes until soft

 

while the potatoes are boiling. You can get started on spicy part. Fry some onions until golden brown and add salt, chillies,crushed garlic and ginger. Add mustard seeds too. You can put peas in too but I hate them.

Mash the potatoes and add the onion ensemble. mix well.

Pastry

Everybody I told was taken aback when I told them I made the pastry too. The conversation when something like this:

I made samosas.

from scratch?

yep.

well done. you bought the pastry though right?

um, no. Made that too.

what?! wow...

If truth be told, I didn't even know you COULD buy the pastry for samosas! (If I had known that I would have bought it instead!)

No store bought pastry, no nonsense.
 

I drizzled a bit of oil into plain flour and kneaded it, adding warm water as I went. the onion in my dough is a trespasser.

 

By this point you will be kneading (get it?) a break.

when it is smooth leave it to sit for 15mins

Put a flat pan on the stove and wait for it to heat as you roll out the dough as if you were making a chapatti. Long, thin and round is the aim. You place them on the pan and wait for them to change colour slightly. do not cook them!

Cut the pastry in half. Right down the middle, as equally as you can. I remember my mum letting me cut the first pastry, it was always wonky. Every time.

These will the the triangles that you fill. I made 18 samosas. Slightly more than I wanted too but when your flatmates threaten to hide your Nutella you don't mind making 10 extra samosas.

Let's stuff those samosas!

Right. So here we are, the moment where this all ends. At this point I was very tired, my dishevelled hair is white with flour and my fingers are overworked by the kneading and the rolling. I clear the work top and pile the dishes high in the sink. I roll up my sleeves, take a histrionic deep breath, roll back my shoulders and with renewed energy say 

"All right. Come on. Let's stuff these samosas." 

And so it began...I emerged from a puff of flour with a small amount of plain flour in a bowl to which I added warm water to make it runny. This is the glue that will seal the samosas.

 Then I got a small spoon, made and sealed the pastry in a cone shape. Then I carefully filled the samosa being careful not to tear the pastry.

Unfortunately after the first stuffing we had a casualty. This pioneering first samosa-to-be-stuffed plummeted 1m to his death.

His death was not in vain.

The next day I took the leftover filling mixed it with some gram flour and made Aloo Tikki to have with the Samosas for dinner. My flatmate, as predicted, made chickpeas to go with them. 

Chana. or chick pea curry.

Aloo Tikki ready to be fried

Samosas are deep fried and Aloo Tikki is shallow fried

Scrumdiddlyumtious!

Finally, dinner time.

Final thoughts

Making samosa was definitely satisfying. There is an unfamiliar fuzzy satisfaction that builds in your chest whenever anyone says  well done or delicious! But the real test will be when I take them home tomorrow for my parents to try. If they like them I'll have to whip up a batch all the time and if they don't I can reclaim my seat as a passive member of team Kumar. And so we wait.

The Cauliflower ban

I think I can stop telling people that I can't cook now.

And do you know how I found this out? Yesterday evening my flatmate was experimenting with an aubergine. She didn't want a curry and she didn't really know what else to do with it (Aubergines are so tricky). She thoughtfully cut them in half, paused and then turned to me with a thoughtful face and said "Indu, how do you think I should make this?" so I made my suggestion and turned my attention to my bolognese again. and then I paused. Slowly, with my converse squeaking on the laminate flooring, I turned to her and she turned to me. Our widened eyes met...did she just ask me for my input in a cooking task?

Well there it is. I am have an opinion on cooking that is valued.
Hurrah!

This change did not occur overnight, I will backtrack and tell you how this happened. It started off with a cauliflower. On a whim I decided I would try cooking a cauliflower dish with potatoes and peas called Aloo Gobi. I purchased the vegetable walked home jauntily and placed it on the counter. It looked at me as if to say "You don't really know what to do with me, do you?"

I consulted a cookbook that I recently purchased in Foyles. It's called Indian Family Cookbook and it has a pink baroque cover. It's a bit fancy and glossy to be practical in the kitchen but it had wonderful pictures and a nice introduction by Simon Daley and his mother-in-law Roshan Hirani (Rose).

Indian Family Cookbook by Simon Daley with Roshan Hirani

The introduction establishes a very homely, family-orientated cooking.  The kind of Indian cooking Daley describes is from Indian province Gujarat which is South-west of Punjab, as you can see on the map.


My flatmate happens to be Gujarati and describes the cooking as not as "fattening as your [Punjabi] cooking". This 'Us and Them' separation is most distinctive in attitudes towards food.  Each region has a distinctive cooking style and a pride about it. I remember having a bite of a Gujarati style samosa. It was a small crispy triangle and I remember thinking, "Pah! too sweet!"

The regional pride filters into cooking techniques too, like in my flatmates suggestion that Gujarati food healthier than Punjabi food. There is some truth in this because on the flip side Gujarati food is seen as too light by Punjabi foodies. My Gujarati flatmate says of a fried flat-bread "You guys put butter on the inside and outsides of your parathas and we just put it on the outsides"

Now, I can't pretend to unwrap the ideologies of Indians worldwide but I can give you a microscopic view of the dynamics of British Indian students. I cook with another girl of Punjabi descent, a keen Gujarati cook and a a very very keen French cook of Algerian-Moroccan descent. There are at least 3 different meals being made every evening (mine normally comes from a packet so barely qualifies) and there is always a lot of debate. A typical conversation in our house follows this format:

"Are you guys hungry too?" everybody nods enthusiastically.

Gujarati cook begins to describe a Gujarati meal.

Confused looks all round.

Gujarati cook tells the Punjabi cooks what we call the dish in Punjabi.

"ooh! that dish, yes we call it..." 

Moroccan cook remains confused.

There is a constant overlap between Gujarati and Punjabi cuisine reflected in the  layer of languages used. We use the French, Punjabi and Gujarati words for specific food dishes and alternate between them.

So now we've established a few attitudes to regional Indian cooking let us get back to Simon Daley's Introduction. He writes about his first experience of Indian home cooking at his mother-in-laws house:

Daley's description highlights the homeliness of the environment. Rose's house is a home, not only does it boast of "dented" pans and "wipe-clean tablecloths" but everything about the house is to do with practicality not pretence. In the previous paragraph Daley describes the "bulk- bought food" and "industrial sized cans of cooking oil" which adds to the practicality of the household. There is no glamour or show only homemade, wholesome food. Nourishment and happiness seem to be at the heart of Daley's representation of the household and the reader is evidently supposed to warm to Rose and regard her as an expert. Daley describes an "impressive stack" of chapatis and a "pristine layer" of  "perfect rice". To add to the domesticity of Rose's home he also likens her chapptis to "breeze-blown pillowcases". And everybody knows there is NOTHING more domestic than breeze blown pillowcases.

This is the reason I chose this cookbook out of all the eye-catching Indian cookbooks in Foyles. It had a real authenticity about it. Even though the cookbook wasn't about Punjabi cooking, I hadn't noticed until I got home, there was a lot of overlap between Rose's recipes and the ones my family cook.

Let's get on to the Aloo Gobi itself.

Mine actually resembled the glossy book version! Wahey!

The all important ingredients. SALT, PEAS,POTATOES,CHILLIES

I didn't actually follow the recipe but used some innate knowledge of measurement. and tasting as I went along

Aloo Gobi. I added peas for colour and avoided them when I ate them. I don't even like peas!

By this point I was on a cooking high (must have been the chillies) and I thought that I may as well make chapattis too. My mother had given me the flour in the vain hope that I would eat well at university (ha!)

Kneading the dough.

Makeshift utensils. Upside down oven tray.

Not as round as they should be but by this point I was tired. This cooking business really takes it out of you!

Waiting for it to blister

Chapati

A simple home cooked meal.

By this point you must be wondering what this cauliflower ban is about when it seems to have been made so wonderfully.  What the cookbooks don't tell you is to grab a extra strength Air-wick.

This vegetable, after all the effort you put into making it, will still betray you. It will seep out of the pan and into the kitchen where it will reign until you open all of the windows, wave a tea-towel around in the style of a helicopter and then sit, defeated, in its wicked aroma. At least that is what I saw my flatmates doing when I came into the flat.

East meets West

So far this blog has explored Indian food from a British perspective but what happens when the British adopt and adapt the Indian culinary tradition?

In the past week I have discovered two very interesting adaptations of Indian family cooking. The first occurred when I dug out a Indian Jalfrezi wrap kit that my mother had given me:

 

and the second was a dubious Argi Bhaji sandwich:

Let's start with the names. 
Firstly,what is the 'Argi', in Argi bhaji?  It doesn't mean anything to me in English or any of the Indian languages I understand. But what my ear did pick up was the rhyming quality which makes it memorable. Even if Argi means nothing to me!

Jalfrezi wraps are also an oddity because wraps are distinctly un-Indian to me but I was eager to try this new combination absolutely loved having Jalfrezi in a chapati style wrap. It was lazy Indian food and perfect for a quick meal.

Sharwood's advertising sets the scene:

 From the opening of the advertisement Sharwood's has emphasised the duality of their products, a combination, or a twist, to the traditional curry. This is evident in the contrast between the flamboyant truck and the idealised English countryside. It is worth noting that Sharwood's does not intend to recreate a traditional home cooked meal, but it aims to mimic the restaurant curries that the nation is fond of.

The wrap kit is as easy as they claim:

Only three steps? My kind of meal.

Everything you need.

Stir fry chicken. I couldn't leave the recipe untouched and added chopped green chili's and turmeric powder

And then the peppers. Finally some colour!

What Sharwood's have called a spice blend. But on close inspection it seems to be Garam Masala which is a traditional Indian blend of cumin seeds, black and white pepper corn, cardamom and cloves.

It goes into the warm wrap, with some of the mysterious salsa they provided. I added a dollop of greek yoghurt because I added extra chilli!

My overall experiance of these spin-offs has been mixed. I throughly enjoyed the Sharwood's wrap kit because the combination of salsa and Jalfrezi chicken complimented eachother. The sandwich is another matter, it had the potential to be a great vegetarian sandwich but something did not live up to expectation. Firstly, let us rule out the argument that bhaji's cannot go with bread because it becomes too dry. My mother makes bread bhajis that are delicious she smothers triangles of bread into the batter of potato spinach and gram flour. There doesn't seem to be any innate incompatibility between bread and bhaji, and the ingrediedents are authentic, I can only conclude that inside the sandwich was too bland a bhaji.

Introduction

Introduction

So I guess I should introduce myself first. This is me:

And so is this!

and again.

You see, the thing about these photographs is that it looks like I'm at home in the kitchen but the trouble is - I'm not. I'm not a foodie. I eat all sorts of rubbish (I'm a student after all) and I have to confess... I'm actually a terrible cook. And I'm not talking about measuring amounts or rubbish baking. I mean burning soup and never getting toast right the first time. It's probably worse because my whole family is centred around food, and not its just the Kumars. Our entire lives are centred around meals, days are structured around it, weekly meal plans are made, shopping lists constructed, ingredients purchased.

My family enjoy food. Not just the meal, the debate of what to have for dinner, how we should make it and what will accompany the mouth-watering morsels that we envisage. My mother and father buy fresh ingredients and prepare the food together. A pinch of love here, and a sprinkling of laughter there. I did not inherit this love of cooking but I'm forced to change. Here it goes. My name is Indu and I'm a bad cook.