Okay, so this isn’t so much a quick, throw it together on a weeknight after work kind of recipe. But it’s definitely worth all the pieces and parts that go into it. This is also the first time I’ve worked with a vegan béchamel sauce. It came out really nice. I was surprised. Makes me want to revisit some old ovo/lacto recipes I used to make. Oh yeah, I should say it’s from Yellow Rose Recipes. I’m tired or I’d rave more about it instead of just going to bed.
Category: food
Fake Samosas
The March issue of Real Simple had a cool quickie recipe for samosas in it that involved using pre-made pie crust dough and convenience mashed potatoes you can buy in the refrigerator section. Side note: is it really that freakin’ hard to make mashed potatoes? I mean, come on, boil, mash, eat. Anyway, I thought I’d give that a try using sweet potatoes instead of white ones. Of course all the pre-made pie crust dough at the regular grocery store was all larded up. So I just used puff pastry. I knew the texture wouldn’t be the same or anything close to authentic, but what the hell, I also knew it would be good. When is puff pastry NOT good? Plus I had a jar of mango chutney sitting around that I picked up from Taj Mahal when I was there with Leigh.
Anyway, here’s the recipe with my changes.
Quickie Sweet Potato Samosas
* 1 tablespoon olive oil
* 1 med. onion, chopped
* ¾ teaspoon salt
* ½ teaspoon pepper
* ½ teaspoon ground red pepper
* 1 ½ teaspoons curry powder
* 2 cups mashed cooked sweet potatoes
* 10 ounces frozen peas, thawed
* 1 package puff pastry, thawed
* 1 jar mango chutney
Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft and golden brown, about 8 minutes.
Add salt, pepper, ground red pepper and curry powder and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Remove from heat and stir in the sweet potatoes and peas.
Unfold the puff pastry dough and cut each piece into 6 triangles. Place a heaping tablespoon of the potato mixture in the center of each piece. Gather the corners of the dough and pinch to form a point. Pinch the seams to seal. Transfer to a baking sheet.
Bake the samosas until golden, about 25 minutes. Serve with mango chutney. And now for the pics. The innards:
Ready to be baked:
All puffy and golden:
Tour of Buford Highway
Saturday I hit a couple of ethnic markets on Buford Highway in addition to my regular weekly visit to the DeKalb Farmers Market. A lot of this stuff you can get in the regular grocery store, but it’s much cheaper here. Plus there are random things that can be hard to find like a jar of mole with a screw top lid you can re-close. So here’s my haul from the Hispanic market: enchilada sauce, hominy, refried beans with chipotle, habeño sauce, ready to serve mole in a cool aseptic container, refried black beans, chipotle sauce, marinated cactus, mole with a screw top lid, a small jar of chipotle in adobo and a big stack of corn tortillas. Not pictured: butternut squash, shallots, onions, and a serrano. 
Next, Atlanta’s Farmers Market, which also has Hispanic goods, but I was headed there for the Asian stuff. Here I picked up a couple of different rice stick noodles and some bean threads, mock duck, coconut milk, rice seasoning, vegetarian steak, coconut cream, pepper corns (I’m pretty sure these are the things also known as Szechwan pepper corns) and fermented black beans. Not pictured: two different sizes/shapes of rice papers. 
Seems like I’m missing some items. I’m not gonna post the rest as it’s just normal rice milk, soy milk, apples, coffee, etc. I’m not sure why I bought all this stuff. I don’t have room for it. 🙂
Contains real vegetarians!
Contains real vegetarians!, originally uploaded by abracapocus.
Uh, what?
Uh, what?, originally uploaded by abracapocus.