Recreating my favourite takeaways

Home-made onion bhajis and samosas (half meat, half vegetarian) - yum!

For the bhajis, I used this recipe, but with normal brown onions instead of red ones. I always feel uncomfortable at the thought of deep frying, but if the oil is at the right temperature the outside is sealed immediately and so less fat is absorbed. They were absolutely delicious and as good (if not better) than a takeaway.

The samosas were loosely based on a recipe from Rachel's Favourite Food at Home - she recommends using filo pastry as a substitute for samosa pastry. The recipe made 22 in the end, with half filled with lamb and the other half with potato, but I varied her filling as I didn't feel that it had enough flavour. For the lamb ones, I finely diced 1 onion and fried it in garlic olive oil until soft, before adding 150g lamb which was cut into small dice. I fried this for 5 minutes until it had browned, then added 1tsp curry powder, 1tsp garam masala and 1tsp cumin, before stirring in 50g frozen peas.

The potato filling was similar, but with 150g of boiled and cubed new potato instead of the lamb. The lamb filling was a little dry, so next time I'm going to add some potato as well to help bind it together. I'm also going to find a recipe for samosa pastry as the filo pastry was a bit floppy and delicate - it was hard to get a good amount of filling in without the pastry splitting and making a mess. They were a lot of fun to make though - I always enjoy trying something new.