Vegetable samosas

This year my friends and I celebrated the start of 2009 with a proper Indian feast. Indian is a cuisine that I haven't dabbled in much in the past, but I'm always up for a challenge. I'm not known for eating early and New Year's Eve is the ideal night to try something new as its pretty much assumed that your guests are in it for the long haul.

Our New Year's Eve dinner consisted of a number of Indian dishes:

• Vegetable samosas


• Lentil soup


• Butter chicken


• Lamb curry


• Vegetable korma


• Rice with spices, raisins and pistachios

The pièce de résistance, in my opinion, were the samosas, and they are surprising easy to make from scratch. The filling was simple - in this case sautéed diced vegetables - with traditional Indian spices such as curry powder, coriander, tumeric, mustard seed and a little chili. The pastry was flour, water, ghee and a little lemon juice - which I rolled out with a wine bottle (unlike a rolling pin, there always seems to be one of those on hand).


The best thing was that I could make them in the afternoon and store them in a Ziploc with a damp towel, frying them for a few minutes in hot oil after the guests had arrived. The result was a crispy, tasty app, and not overly doughy like the ones you get from the local grocery store.