Feeding Friendship: Lentils

For this round Ellie chose the humble, yet powerful lentil as our key ingredient. I have a good lentil pasta soup recipe, and one for a lentil and rice "casserole" that we used to put in burritos when I was younger, but I wanted to branch out. In my continuing quest to try cooking more Indian food, I had already found a recipe for Dal Ke Samose (lentil samosas), so this was an easy choice try to it out. The recipe I used is from a blog called Food Wanderings, which you should check out, so I won't reproduce all the directions. Here's the ingredient list though for planning/shopping purposes.

Filling:
1 cup toor dal/ split pigeon pea/lentils
1/2 cup spring onions, finely chopped
1/4 cup mint leaves, chopped
1/4 cup coriander leaves, chopped
1 green chili, finely chopped
1 tsp red chili powder
1 tsp garam masala spice mix
1 tsp roasted cumin powder
Salt to taste

"Glue"
3Tbl water
1/4 cup AP flour
(I might cut this in half if you don't intend to make millions of samosas, you can always make more glue)

Dough:
1 package frozen spring roll wrappers, thawed to room temperature

 I didn't use all the spices listed because I wasn't crazy about the idea of mint, and wasn't sure what to do about coriander leaves, so I just omitted those. The author's idea to use spring roll wrappers is genius and was a big time saver over making dough.  It also meant the crusts were thin and even, which (let's be real) wouldn't be likely with homemade dough.

Your first step is to prepare your lentils, which means rinsing them, picking out the weird ones, and then boiling them until they are tender. Mine were a little too done at 45 minutes boiling, so I would start checking them at 30.

rinsed

boiling

tender 

You basically just mix in your spices and cut your spring roll wrappers in half, then stuff the mixture into the wrappers. 

spice mixture

cut your wrappers in half, making 2 strips

I had to really burn the grey matter to understand the folding instructions on her page, but practice made perfect(ish). They weren't unclear, I just have trouble doing spacial reasoning based on 2D pictures. My samosas were increasingly triangular, and after about lucky number 9 they started to look like her pictures, more or less. The step I added to her process was to put a little water/flour "glue" along the left edge of your wrapper after you make the first fold she talks about. So, you've got glue running along the left edge starting from the top of the diagonal fold and going to the top of the wrapper. This helps your little dough cone stick together better while you are filling it with lentils and prevents leaks later. 

filling the dough cone with lentils

finally starting to look samosa-esque

Her recipe says this makes "10-12." Either I'm seriously under-filling my samosas, or this is a terrible estimate. I got tired of filling around #14 and could have probably made 10 more with the amount of lentils I had left. So I'd estimate more like 2 dozen, depending upon how much you stuff yours. 

The next stage is frying and her suggestion to use a wok is a good one. The high sides helped keep the samosas in check and the pan heats up quickly. I used canola oil, but you can use whatever strikes your fancy. 

frying the samosas

the finished pile

The nice thing about the spring roll wrappers is that they make it obvious when they are done. When they are golden and bubbly all over, you're good to go. After I had gone through all these steps I had a moment of panic thinking about the red dipping sauce I had seen in her photos. I hadn't planned anything for the sauce and was suddenly overcome thinking of all the hard-to-find Indian sauce ingredients that I surely hadn't bought. Imagine my relief to read these 3 words: serve with ketchup. Done. I whipped up a little quinoa pilaf to go on the side and called it a night. Not too hard overall, you just have to start early due to the 30 minutes of lentil boiling you'll need to do ahead. 

I thought they were tasty and not very spicy, just flavorful. George ate about a half dozen in one sitting, so they passed the husband test. All in all, I would definitely recommend this recipe.