Crisis

Pea, onion and carrot pakoras

I've had a hankering for pakoras for a few days and though I've not cooked them before I decided we'd have them for lunch.

I used Jeena's recipe for Onion Bhajis as a basis because she uses an oven rather than deep frying. I deep fry so rarely that I find doing it for anything small a pain -- particularly the amount of oil it uses that then needs to be disposed of because it won't get used anytime soon. While I'm not entirely convinced that cooking with oil in the oven is any healthier than deep frying[1], I can vouch for the recipe tasting delicious.

My alterations were to add a half teaspoon of amchoor to the onion spice mix, some peas and some grated carrot.

[1] If you deep fry in small batches at a high temperature, little oil gets absorbed. I'm not saying that they're fat free by any means, but fried food is often demonised when in reality the problem is more about balanced diet and proper technique.

Houmous

On Friday we had friends over for dinner. As part of things I bought some houmous, kicking myself for not having had the forethought to make some before hand. Dried chickpeas are cheap and, more importantly, home made houmous is better than much shop bought stuff.

So anyway, yesterday I soaked some chickpeas and today I've made up the houmous. My recipe is based partly on instinct and partly on checking online recipes and coming up with a derived version.

2 cups of chickpeas, soaked overnight, boiled, then simmered for 90 minutes
1 cup tahini
a few cloves of garlic
1 tsp cumin, roasted and ground
a few tbsp extra virgin olive oil
a few tbsp lemon juice (actually I used the liquid from preserved lemons)
black pepper
salt (I skipped this given the preserved lemons were salted)
water to thin

Blended for several minutes in a food processor, it made about 1.5L of houmous, most of which I have put in the freezer.

The photo is hardly a thing of beauty but the taste certainly is.