I must be on an Indian-food kick or something …

A college roommate of mine, Bina, was/is a great cook. All sorts of Indian flavors and aromas came from our apartment kitchen. Her menu was mainly Indian, but she also taught me how to make a kickin’ mac & cheese, too. Bina was a local (actually all of my roommates that year were from Chicago. I was the only out-of-towner) so when her parents came to visit or when she returned from a trip home she’d stock the kitchen with jars (and I’m talking spaghetti-sauce jar sizes) full of spices. Jars with no names or labels on them. Having been in the kitchen a few years now, I’m see now that those jars of spices were of cumin seeds, coriander, and turmeric (well the turmeric wasn’t difficult to spot back then, either), but back then Bina would just throw the spices into the pan in a “I-know-what-I’m-doing” kind of way. I bring this all up because Bina had a knack for making homemade samosas. Bina is a vegetarian, and so were the samosas. A crispy outer shell with a spicy, warm potato/pea filling on the inside. I was happy to partake in her cooking adventures.

Flash forward to this weekend. Two days in a row I’ve gone to the MM deli counter to get me a turkey samosa with cilantro chutney. Those suckers are g-o-o-d. But they are obviously deep-fried and I can’t be including that kind of goodness in my diet all that often. So, I went to the Web in search of a samosa recipe that I didn’t have to fry. (I have made samosas before … though back then I used a Moosewood recipe. This time I was in search of something meaty).

I found a few recipes that used Phyllo dough and then found one site that suggested, for oven-baked, to try Puff Pastry. So I did.

The results … were okay. I did a major Top Chef kind of error and forgot to taste the filling. Had I tasted I would have known that I forgot to season it enough (it certainly could have used a little more kick. I was using ground chicken. I wonder if I had uised lamb or beef if it wouldn’t have needed as much but oh well). Anyway … ground chicken, onion, peas, seasoned with fresh garlic and ginger; cumin, curry, turmeric and mint (rather than cilantro). All wrapped up in a thawed out puff pastry sheet cut into 12 pieces.

They are good, not great. And they are far smaller than the ones you see in an Indian restaurant or the Whole Foods or MM deli. The husband just downed three of them with a little bit of mango chutney on the side. The look of the samosa within a puff pastry shell reminds me of the very tasty Chinese beef curry turnover. As I have one more puff pastry sheet hanging out in the freezer, I think I’ll have to try that on for size.