How To Make Easy Vegetable Samosas

It’s hard to say how many samosas you can expect to make with one packet of filo pastry; it depends on the size and how much pastry you waste in the process, but as a rough guide you should get between eight and 12. There’s no need to be nervous about cooking with filo pastry either; it’s more resilient than it looks, but for some reason I always find the ready-made filo pastry from the chill cabinet easier to handle than the frozen stuff, I don’t know why. This is yet another good way of using up leftover potatoes – boiled or mashed – although it’s easy enough to cook a few potatoes from scratch if you don’t have leftovers, and this is one recipe where it won’t matter if you resort to a packet of instant mash instead of using fresh potatoes; the overall texture and flavour of the other ingredients is a great disguise.

1. Step 1:

   Put the frozen vegetables in a saucepan of boiling water and leave to stand for a couple of minutes while you get the rest of the ingredients ready. (No need to cook them properly, they just need to be softened up a bit.)

2. Step 2:

   Drain the vegetables and mix with the mashed potato or diced boiled potatoes and spices.

3. Step 3:

   Grease one or two oven trays with oil, preheat the oven to Gas Mark 5 (190°C) and melt the butter in the microwave.

4. Step 4:

   Lay the sheets of filo pastry out on a clean work surface, two or three at a time depending on how much room you’ve got, and cut into long rectangular strips; you should get about four strips from each sheet of filo.

5. Step 5:

   Place a dessertspoonful of filling on the left-hand side of each strip then fold the right-hand side of the pastry over diagonally to make a triangle. Carry on folding the samosa over, keeping the triangular shape, until you come to the end of the pastry, then brush generously with melted butter, gently sealing the joins, and place the samosa on the oven tray.

6. Step 6:

   Cook the samosas in the oven for about 10 minutes, or until the pastry is a deep golden brown. Eat hot or cold, with or without rice, or as a side dish with another curry.