Chicken Samosas And Off to India!

Yes, after 16+ long years, I have finally made plans to visit India! Awesome, isn't it?! I am really very very very excited and looking forward to it. So, until my return, Ciao and keep well!

And that's why I got so busy in these past few weeks, I really had no time to see my blog or comments. I am just posting this one and that's it. will come back from my vacation and check out all your lovely blogs friends.
Vegetable samosa is a hot item here everywhere you go. People just love samosas. Indian food to them, is samosas and butter chicken. I, on the other hand, can’t stand the samosas we get at the restaurants here in the USA or Canada. They are not the samosas I grew up eating. In Gujarat, we get samosas with mashed peas and potatoes filling or for non vegetarians, it’s spicy, ground chicken/beef filling. So this is my take on the spicy meat samosas. To get that authentic touch, next time when I made this, I used spring roll wrappers instead of hand rolled sheets. Sometime, before I take the pictures of the end product, I get nothing on the platter! That’s exactly what happened when I made the samosas with spring rolls wrappers. So no pictures for that. The taste was just near authentic and it did transport us back home.

Chicken Samosas
Ingredients
6 spring roll wrappers, cut in half(lengh wise)
1 lb. ground chicken
1 large onion
1 head of garlic
1 cup loosely packed mint leaves
5-6 green chillies
Salt
Oil for frying
1 tbsp corn starch
1 cup water

How to:
Place onion, garlic, mint leaves, chillies in the food processor and process till nicely chopped.
Heat a sauce pot, add ground chicken and ground onion mix and salt.
Cook till all the water/fat evaporates and you end up with dry filling.
Make slurry of corn starch with water.
Take half the wrapper, fold in samosa shape(don’t have the pictures of that, sorry!)
 Fill with about a tbsp of chicken mixture.
With corn starch slurry, wet your fingers and close the wrappers, pinching them tightly.
Heat oil to 375° F.
Fry all the samosas till golden.
Enjoy.

Potato Cups

These are just the extension of my recipe, Potato Cakes. As you know, I am a self proclaimed queen of potatoes. I absolutely love potatoes. I can have potatoes 365 days a year! And I know they are so versatile, so forgiving, you can make whatever you want with them, you can mix them with anything or leave them alone(by this I mean, cook just THEM!), you would end up with a great tasting dish.  I wonder how some races on the face of the earth don’t cook and eat potatoes!

Well, so I just prepared the potatoes the way I did in my Potato Cakes recipe. And instead of frying them, I baked them in preoiled muffin pan in the hot hot hot oven. And got these potato cups. I served them two ways. First one as the picture shows, as a breakfast accompaniment with cheese omelet and chocolate chip pancakes. Second, I don’t have the pictures but I served them topped with hot sauce, sour cream and chopped tomatoes and avocados.