My neighbor Christina has a daughter named Danica, who loves her family, her cats, and confounding me playing SuperMario games. She’s light and breezy, mature and tough, and extremely easy to be around.
Maybe the daughter I always secretly wanted…
She also has a weakness for my baked goods, especially the sweet stuff.
It’s because of her fondness for focaccia that I’ve taken to keeping some sourdough discard on hand for that very occasion. Ditto for scones.
Recently, she asked me to make her curry puffs. Not the Malaysian kind, Indian.
I happened upon a doable recipe from the Cooking Foodie, using vegetables anyone has in the pantry (carrots, potatoes, garlic, onion, frozen peas) and only a few semi-exotic spices (garam masala, turmeric).
At first, I didn’t think I could even make them. No way was I learning puff pastry from scratch, and where on earth could I find paneer in Twin Falls, ID? The first recipe I looked up required paneer and potato.
In the end, it all worked out. Even when I tweaked my trigger finger making flour, then corn, tortillas back to back weekends, my husband Ed stepped in to help chop up all the aromatics (a lot), stir them in a pan, roll out store-bought puff pastry (Pepperidge Farms) and then cut out perfect, five-inch squares to fill, press, and crimp for the oven.
They turned out well.
The look on Christina and Danica’s faces, Dani biting immediately into one from the middle, and giving me a big, warm hug…that’s why I do this.
The recipe isn’t perfect by any means. It didn’t receive a lot of stars.
But there aren’t a lot of easy ones around online. They all tend to overly complicate the ingredient list and instructions.
I’d steam both the potatoes and carrots, not just the potatoes, as it takes forever to cook the carrots while stir-frying with the aromatics. The onions took longer then five-six minutes to turn golden.
Never just salt and pepper at the end, but with every layer, and then salt some more. The vegetable filling was bland — until I did.
Soy sauce, a condiment Christina’s cheffy husband Dominic taught me, will transform the most bland Indian curry. So why not this filling?
Next time…maybe chicken or beef curry puffs.
Or samosas. I love them with cilantro chutney…
Wow! They look perfect!