Vegetarian Samosas

On the way home from our honeymoon last year the husband and I spent a few days in Melbourne and one night we had dinner with his Aunt and Uncle.  We got talking about cooking and Aunt T shared some cookbooks that she had gathered on her travels.  One of these books was The Moosewood Cookbook which is an American vegetarian cookbook by Mollie Katzen.  Aunt T kindly let us borrow the book for a while and I recently purchased my own copy of the updated version.  Part of the appeal of the book was how it is hand written and illustrated by Mollie, with a few photographs in between.

The first recipe I thought I would try was the samosas as I looooooooove Indian cuisine.

If you are after the recipe for these vegetarian samosas, I was able to track it down online on the Food.com website.

I gathered all of the ingredients and started by making the dough.

This recipe also appealed to me as I was able to use up some of the excess buttermilk I bought for the Red Velvet Rose Cake I made for Inner Wheel.  I added the flour, salt and buttermilk into my trusty mixer with the dough attachment and let it knead away until it was a nice smooth dough.

The dough was wrapped in cling wrap and put in the fridge to rest.

Next step was to boil the potato.  The recipe only called for potatoes but I thought I would make half potato and half sweet potato for some extra flavour.  Once the potatoes are soft, drain and transfer to a bowl and mash.  Set aside to cool.

In a pan, melt the butter and add the onion, ginger, garlic, mustard seeds, salt and coriander.

Cook until the onions are nice and soft (approximately 10 minutes).

Mix this into the mashed potato along with the peas and lemon juice, taking care not to crush the peas.

Set this aside to cool for about 15 minutes so that the pastry doesn’t become too soft when filling.

To assemble, break off 1-2 tablespoons of the dough and roll into a circle (or a circle-ish shape by the picture below) approximately 10-12cm in diameter, but feel free to make them as big or as small as you would like.  Spoon 2 tablespoons of the mixture (I used my smallest ice cream/cookie scoop for ease) into the centre of the dough and then brush the edges with water.

Fold the dough over and seal with a fork.

Keep making until you run out of mixture and/or dough.  We only cooked a few of these on the night and put the remaining in the freezer so we can grab them at a moments notice.

You can deep fry these if you like, but we cooked them in the oven until they were golden brown.

You can serve these with a chutney or dipping sauce, but we didn’t on this occasion (namely because the samosas were cooked by the time we remembered about it).

We had a couple of these each with some salad for dinner.  They tasted good overall but the dough was a little too crunchy in spots.