And What is That?

Before putting it in the oven my husband said, "I don't know but I think they're supposed to look alike." This was my ill-fated attempt at making Samosas, an Indian appetizer filled with a spicy potato/pea mixture. I had all the right intentions but somewhere along the way my first one became misshapen so I tried to correct the next one, then that turned into a glob, trying to correct it, the next one leaned to the left and by the time I was done - they all looked different. (I guess it's good I'm not throwing a dinner party.)

As I had mentioned in an earlier post, my husband's birthday was coming up. My husband likes to cook and I like to try new recipes which we both seldom do. (With children and schedules we're lucky if we get macaroni and cheese made.)  We decided to make  two recipes we really liked: Samosas and Eggs Benedict.

We started out early in the morning. The word for the day is EARLY and is a good indication, things didn't quite go so well. We bought groceries to make this green sauce (cilantro/mint) which is a traditional dip for the samosas. We bought the ingredients for the Eggs Benedict. Finally, we were ready to cook.

Well, you can see how the samosas turned out from above. The filling was pretty good (sauteed sliced onions with some curry powder, add mashed potatoes and at the end peas). The dough, not so much. Who knew Pillsbury pie dough (America's standby and what the recipe called for) doesn't really work so well with Indian food. (I think we should have used phyllo dough which is less doughy.)

Stephane, my husband, worked on the green sauce, called a chutney. My samosas were done after a half hour, his chutney, four hours later and believe me, it took all those four hours to make it. Little did we know, the recipe on this cook's website was wrong!!!   It said to add two cups of mint and one cup of cilantro, along with a tablespoon of sugar and a few other things. My husband took an hour trimming the mint leaves because they were from our garden and it was hard to get ones which were edible. After everything was blended in a blender, we now had green goop which tasted like spearmint gum. Yum! (Not the taste we we're going for.) Where the recipe messed up, the cilantro and mint amounts were interchanged and the cook should have put a teaspoon of sugar, not a tablespoon. Big difference.

As I mentioned before we were trying to save money and at this point we had a lot of ingredients in this concoction. So what did we do? We started adding things around the kitchen to see if we could make it better. Garlic, why not, add a few more cloves, not so good. Let's try some chili paste, not so good still. Maybe a few more jalapenos, no. Yellow mustard, bad idea. More garlic to counteract the spearmint, still not good. What about parsley, that's it. It's supposed to wipe out a bad taste. It helped a little but not enough.

In the end, after an hour of adding things, we now had a full blender of green goop (instead of half) and we were able to make it taste okay and by okay, I mean eatable. (The majority of green goop went back in the refrigerator for someone to eat where it lasted three days and ultimately, ended up in the trash. So much for saving money.)

So now it's 10 P.M. on that day and it's time to start the Eggs Benedict. No, I don't think so. Too tired. Too beaten down by this God forsaken green chutney recipe.

Ah, recipes. They are fun to look at (especially when there are photos), interesting to see how they taste but once you put in all the effort for a long drawn out recipe, it looses its luster. But, I will try again. Just not for a few months.