Peppers With Stuff In

One thing I enjoy is making food out of things at hand. Luckily our cupboards are brimming with weird tins of things like giant beans, snails, olives, nori seaweed, capers and bamboo shoots. Draws full of sheets of rice paper, chickpeas, prawn crackers, lentils and more spices than a Moroccan bazaar. Our fridge, however, is more often than not some sort of cold last chance saloon for things Mrs B brings back from her lunch at work, bits of cheese which have left the “nicely ripe” stage a while back and are hurtling towards Toxic Town, vegetables which seem to be having babies, jars of chutneys and sauces where the sell-by dates go back to the last millennium and, at the back, things wrapped in tin foil which I daren’t open. Actually maybe it should be better to call it a beer fridge with alien elements. Mmm I like that.

I rather envy that bloke Nigel La Lawson who has a spotless fridge full of fresh clean looking produce, all wrapped up in straight-from-the-deli parchment. Ah well, at least I don’t have to wear a corset. One back-of-the-fridge, rather rusty tin I came across not too long ago contained a big block of sheep’s feta and the barely distinguishable sell-by date was still to become history which was a very pleasant surprise. I decided to use it for a side dish that had seeded in my mind when we found a big bag of mini red peppers at the cash & carry. This is not an Oh My God How Original dish but it turned out very well for a big buffet thingy we threw for Big Daughter’s confirmation during the summer. My pet brother-in-law Brian seems to like it, too. And if mini red peppers aren’t available (and they don’t exactly grow on trees – plants, but not trees) then normal peppers sliced into quarters lengthways do the trick.

All the other ingredients were hanging around waiting to die so I dedicate this dish to the Eleanor Rigbys of Kitchenland.

Stuffed Red Peppers

Some red peppers
Some feta cheese
Some capers
Some anchovies
Some olive oil
Some garlic
Some pepper

The observant types may well observe the lack of specific amounts and quantities in the above recipe (does it even qualify as a recipe when it’s so vague?) But this is because one can mix it to ones own particular taste depending on one's love of anchovies and capers.

Well, one takes ones peppers and one tops them. Then one removes the seeds and pith (and one quarters them if using grown-up peppers). Then one puts crumbled or cubed feta, capers, chopped anchovy filets, pepper, crushed garlic and generous splooge of olive oil into a mixing bowl and one mixes it with a wooden spoon or the like. It’s good to mash it a bit which releases the flavours of the anchovies and capers as well as breaks down the feta. Then one fills ones peppers, puts 'em into a dish, drizzles 'em with a little oil and bungs 'em in tut oven at 181.5 or so degrees shellfish (385.7 or so degrees barronknight) for twentyish minutes or until they’re nice and soft (but not nice and soft and black).

One can, if one is in one’s pernickety corner, save the tops of one’s mini peppers and replace them after filling. This, as I discovered as I attempted to fill about 60 of the buggers, is a tedious chore as one a) has to replace the right top that belongs to the right body and b) it has to be fitted correctly to, erm, fit correctly. And even then (and after securing them with a toothpick) some fell off after roasting.

Samosa Summarum

Ah, the humble samosa. A deep fried/baked pastry packet of veg and/or meat and/or dried fruit from India/Turkey/North Africa/East Africa/Portugal/Persia (thank you Wikipedia). My personal experience with them comes from the (mainly Kurdish or Turkish owned) greengrocer shops of Copenhagen which often sell them from greasy trays perched on top of the counter. I prefer the veggie ones filled with a spicy potato and pea mixture as my logic gland tells me there ought to be fewer life threatening diseases in slowly deteriorating vegetables than meat. And I think they actually taste better. Win win.

After setting myself the task of creating my own version I hit my first stumbling block – pastry. Life is too short to make it. Thankfully our local Vietnamese “supermarket” has packets of wafer thin frozen spring roll pastry which I quickly deemed perfect for the job. Then it was simply a case following a meandering path between recipes gleaned from various intaweb and bookish sources and my own intuition-cum-imagination. And the result was fab. And terribly cheap. I used small waxy potatoes despite many recipes calling for floury ones and I thought they were fantastic. They retain a more robust consistency, thinks moi.

Samosas

(makes roughly twenty – any leftover filling can be used to make a mean veggie curry)

Frozen spring roll pastry – 40 sheets thawed
1 kg spuds peeled and diced pretty finely
2 large onions chopped
A few cloves of garlic chopped
250 g frozen peas thawed and drained
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon black pepper corns
1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
2 teaspoons tumeric
2-4 chillis chopped
a handful of chopped fresh coriander
3 teaspoons yellow mustard seeds
salt
vegetable oil
flour & water paste
water

Start by roasting off your cumin, coriander, pepper and fenugreek seeds in a large frying or sautéing pan and bunging them into a mortar for some pestling. Then soften the onions and garlic in a little oil, add the potato, chillis, mustard seeds, tumeric, some salt and about three quarters of the spice mix as well as about half a cup of water. Mix up well, cover and cook over a medium heat for five minutes. Then remove the lid and cook until the potatoes are soft and the liquid is almost boiled away, turning over the mixture continuously to prevent burning. Taste to see if you need more salt or spices. When fully cooked add the peas and fresh coriander.

You now let the mixture cool, a fine time to fill up you now empty wine glass. Then you can make your flour and water glue.

I now have to reveal the second of my stumbling blocks – how to make my samosas geometrically correct. Which I never really did but after ten or so I managed to get them looking sort of ok. I ended up having two rather longish corners which I folded back creating something which looked a bit like a trussed chicken. After deep frying until golden brown they looked like roasted trussed chickens. So to assemble the beasts you peel off two sheets from the masses and fold them over creating a triangle. Then place a goodish dollop of mixture somewhere to one side of the middle of this, smear some flour glue along two edges and fold, pushing out as much air as poss. You then fold the edges back on themselves again and crimp.

I would imagine a healthier option would be to bake your samosas, maybe brush them with a little oil or butter to make ‘em shiny. But I wanted the artery clogging version so into a pan of 180 degrees c groundnut oil they were plopped, one at a time (only had a small amount of oil) until the roast chicken appearance was obtained. They were then drained on a rack.

If not eaten immediately these go a bit soft, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My idea was to freeze most of my batch but they were so popular among the B’s (Mr, Mrs & Miss) that they disappeared quicker than a botty burp in a wind tunnel.