Making Samosas!

6/2/12
Kristen says...

Well, my belly is full and I am smiling, because Chris and I had another fun kitchen adventure!

Last weekend we had the supreme honor of being invited over to a friend's house for Indian food...needless to say it was amazingly delicious, especially for two people who were totally starved for Indian food.

You may remember that Chris gave me a Masala Dabba for Christmas last year, and lots of nice spices to fill it up. Since then I've used the spices rather sparingly, mostly for the filling/topping of my empanadas. However, since our friend was kind enough to give us her recipe for samosas, we thought we'd better get adventurous and try them out!

So, we started with the spices. Anyone who has eaten Indian food knows what makes it special and delicious are the spices. We had to gave Garam Masala, a very popular spice mixture that you can buy already blended or make your own...or at least you can in the US. Since we are in Honduras, Garam Masala isn't readily available (or available at all), so we had to follow a recipe to make our own.

The first thing we had to do was toast a bunch of spices that start with the letter "C":

Coriander

Cardamom

Cumin

Cloves

Cinnamon

We put them in a pan and toasted them until they were a lovely shade of brown:

 

 After they were toasty we took the seeds out of the cardamom...

 ...and then added mace...

...and used the spice grinder to make...

 GARAM MASALA!

By the way, I hate to bring up my own mistakes, but I thought I would pause a moment to point out the lid to my "spice" grinder...you might notice that it's a little, um, cloudy? Well, did you know that cloves have an oil that etches plastic? Because it does! A few weeks ago I decided to make some delicious molasses cookies, but I only had whole cloves, so I used my trusty grinder and...promptly ruined the lid. Oops. Oh well, tonight proved that it still grinds just fine. :)

ANYWAY, enough of that. :) Back to the samosas.

After the Garam Masala was ready to go, we put the potatoes on to boil...which took a lot of time. As they were boiling away Chris chopped the onion and set it to cooking with some more cumin seeds.

 Next he added peas and carrots (and was supposed to add green beans but they make me gag so I nixed them...ICK!)

Those together cooked into this delicious mix...

...to which we added the Garam Masala and some ground corriander.

At that point the potatoes were finally ready, so I peeled them and "cubed' them...

...and added them to the rest of the mix...

 ...which looks kind of terrible but tastes DELICIOUS! YUM!

So the samosa filling was ready, now it was time for the outside. According to our friend, most Indians she knows won't make samosas at home because the dough is super-tricky and a lot of times they don't turn out. Our friend, who used to live in Texas, said she found that regular old flour tortillas cut in half work just fine!

So we bought some and cut them in half.

 The way to make a samosa is to first create a cone...fold one side...

 ...and then the other (go figure).

To make sure it stays together you have to use edible glue (flour+water).

Once you have a lovely cone, you open it up wide...

...and stuff it chock-full of delicious samosa filling. :)

Next you close it up...

...add the edible glue...

...and then close it up tight, making a cute little triangular bundle of goodness.

Here it is with all its friends.

Which we then took all the nutrition out by deep frying it. :) This was Chris' and my first time deep-frying anything, ever. Frankly, it scared the crap out of me, having that pot of boiling hot oil that close to Chris, Pip and I...

...but it all worked out! We ended up with a plate full of delicious, deep-fried samosa goodness,which we thoroughly enjoyed for dinner tonight! :)

Here is proof:

Yeah, they're pretty good :)

Yum, right?!

So that was our fun food-adventure of the night. Now we just have to clean up the mess... :-S

KF

The Anatomy of a Two-Day Doily

13/5/12
Kristen says...

Hello again:

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!! :)

It's been an EXCEPTIONALLY low-key and, dare I say, somewhat boring weekend around here.

We were planning to go somewhere, maybe to Valle, maybe even to Amapala...but no, we were foiled by the dreaded car AGAIN! Like it or not, our car is over 10 years old, and it seems to need quite a bit of work right now. This time it's the gas tank...it has a very inconvenient hole in it! How sad. (#%$&@*!!!!!!!) So it's going back to the mechanic tomorrow, for what I can only hope will be the last time. I mean really, what else can there be to fix?!

The nice thing is, besides the miles we've put onto the car, it's really a nicer car than when we bought it...new tires, rebuilt transmission, now a new gas tank...sigh.

Anyway, without wheels we were basically "stuck" at home, which isn't a bad place to be, just a little uneventful.

Chris has come up with some fun time-fillers (and de-stressers) recently...coloring and blowing bubbles!

I did have a function to attend yesterday, but luckily I was able to attend it over the Internet. Although I can't say it's better than my Alma Mater, Drake University, (in fact it's one of our big rivals), my "littlest' brother graduated Summa Cum Laude from Creighton University yesterday, and Creighton was awesome enough to stream the graduation online! (All 2 hrs and 40 minutes of it!)

Luckily for me, I got to watch the entirety in my pajamas and got to tat through the whole thing without feeling rude or having people stare...

I actually added another round to my white doily on Friday night...

...but the next round is a little involved, and I didn't want to have to focus too much on the doily and miss the graduation (or vice-versa), so I started another, slightly less involved project.

I started it with thread in a lovely caramel brown color:

And then decided that I should branch out a bit and make it multi-colored, so next I brought in my favorite off-white Turkish cotton thread:

 But OOPS! After finishing the second round I looked back at the pattern and realized that I'd done it WRONG (check out the puckering on the far end) so I cut it all off and re-did it correctly:

 Then I decided to change up the color again and use a nice pure-white thread:

 And then back to the softer off-white:

 And this afternoon I finished it up with the caramel brown again:

But I wonder...it feels a little unfinished. This is what the pattern is supposed to look like, but it just doesn't feel complete somehow.

I'm considering adding another round similar in the pure-white around the outside, using the ring-chain pattern of the inside rounds, attaching it to the center picot of the two chains on the top of the outer motifs and having a free ring between each of the motifs...

I'd love to have your feedback and thoughts on that idea (or other suggestions if you have them)!

There are only 4 weeks of school left (!) and I have already completed and submitted all my lesson plans, so it's just implementation at this point...I can almost smell summer!

Hope all you mothers had a wonderful day! :)
KF

Motifs 4-6!

6/5/12
Kristen says...

Hello again!

Well, what with Semana Santa, and last weekend being a 4-day weekend (YAY! It was the International Day of the Worker, didn't you know? ;) I have had a bit of time to do a bit of tatting.

I sent home about half of my tatting books with my sister when she was here in March, so I've been working with "limits"...but I think this is good because with less choice comes fewer decisions...does anyone else run into the problem of having too many ideas of what to try to create, so you just sit around deciding rather than doing?

I started out with a doily because I hadn't really made one since last summer. I liked this pattern from Gun Blomqvist and Elwy Persson's Tatting: Patterns and Designs. It is pictured in white in the book, but because I worked on it over Semana Santa, I thought I'd make it in Easter/Spring colors instead:

This thing, although really pretty, was kind of a pain to make...I ran out of both the purple and the blue thread at different times, so I had to go back to the thread store twice!

I also like the myriad of motifs in Tatting: Patterns and Designs. In order to actually get back into the motif-making mode (and to attempt to actually get to 25 this year! :-S), I started working through some of those, and came up with these:

Motif #4

Motif #5

 Working small is nice, but I also like the goal of completion that comes with doilies, so I have started to work on another, which began with:

Motif #6

 I finished the second round of this doily last night, and I have to say I'm really liking it:

 One of my favorite parts is actually how the center motif raises up a little bit. You can kind of tell in the picture above, and I tried to take a picture of it from the side below, but you can't really tell how pleasantly the middle bubbles up unless you see it in person.

 Of course, I'll have to iron and block it away later, but for right now I am totally digging it. I'll let you know how the doily grows over the next few weeks...we're in the home stretch of the school year so my tatting-time is limited, but when school is done, I'll have nothing but time! :)

Speaking of school, I had to do an "All About Me" (o, "Todo Sobre Mi" en Español) project in my Spanish class last week.

 I had to put in parts about my physical characteristics, favorite and influential people in my life, a timeline, my future plans, and my "gustos" or likes and "pasa tiempos" or hobbies. Of course, tatting made the top of the list, and since it was a project I had to present, I figured what better way to kill a lot of presentation time than to do a demonstration...

Apparently I'm very intent on this piece of string

So, I brought some #5 thread and my #3 needles to class and taught four 5th grade girls and my friend/teacher Maricarmen how to tat! IN SPANISH! Boy was that hard!

Thread the needle

I've never felt I have successfully taught anyone how to tat in English, let alone in Spanish, but I was very impressed at how quickly the girls picked it up. I think the fact that the class was so small really helped, as well as the fact that the girls thought it was fun! Although some got it more quickly than others, they all ended up with some rings and chains at the end of the class. It was really cute...when class ended they all helped each other tie their tatting on as necklaces or bracelets, depending on how much thread they had left!

I told them if they wanted another lesson I'd be glad to spend time with them after school, so maybe I'll get a couple of them to really learn...either way, I now know I can not only do it myself, but actually teach it, too...good times. (Now if I could only figure out shuttle tatting...)

KF