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Pakoras – snack, meal all by themselves, lunchbox fodder.
It’s Friday again and, as I like to remind people from time to time, I don’t work Fridays. However, it’s also the school holidays up here so I’ve got the full complement of 5 kids to look after. When I told that to one of my colleagues yesterday he said he knew where he’d rather be and patted his desk.
Now. My old schoolmate Mac asked what my recipe for pakoras was. So here goes.
Pakoras are a great way of making leftover vegetables from other recipes go a long way. You don’t need a lot of anything (apart from gram flour) and by changing the vegetables involved you can really change the flavour and texture of the finished product. Chillies are, of course, optional. If you’re going to miss them out, finely slice some chunks of bell pepper instead to keep some of the crunch and flavour whilst taking away the heat.
Ingredients
- 2 onions. Quarter the onions and then slice finely creating little arcs of onion.
- 1 large potato. Peel and cut into big chips and then slice them finely. You want bits about the size of the last joint on your little finger. If you don’t have a little finger, the ring finger will do.
- 1 sweet potato. Treat just like the large potato. If you don’t have sweet potatoes, add another spud instead.
- 1/2 aubergine. Again, chop as the spuds.
- 1 courgette. Cut in half lengthways and then slice finely.
- 1 bag of curly kale. I’ve tried spinach and it’s just as good but the texture the curly kale brings to the dish is super.
- Handful of chopped coriander. About half of the big pack you get in Tescos.
- Generous handful of dried fenugreek leaves.
- 2 tbs coriander seeds, coarsely ground
- 2 tbs cumin seeds, likewise.
- 2 tsp salt.
- 1 tsp chilli powder (when I’m cooking for the kids I substitute paprika here)
- Chillies – to taste.
- Red peppers if required.
- A big bag of gram flour (at least 1kg)
- Oil for deep frying.
Right. When I do this, I’m cooking for both adults and kids, so I’ve got 2 big mixing bowls. Half of each ingredient goes into each bowl right down to the chillies. The chillies go into the adult bowl, the red peppers go into the kids bowl. Not only does that give you the option to have full heat mix for the grownups, it also gives you a quick visual check to make sure you’re not about to feed fire to your youngest! If you can see the red peppers, it’s kid-safe. If you can’t, then don’t risk it! Or try it first.
Mix everything together then start adding the gram flour. You want to make sure everything’s coated sufficiently to bind it all together but not have so much it’s a big, stodgy, floury mess. When you reckon you’ve got enough, add some water and mix again. In essence you’re making a batter around the vegetables. If it’s too sticky, add some more water. If it’s too liquid, add some more flour. You want a mixture you can pick up on a spoon and that will slide off again into the hot oil.
While you’re mixing, get the deep fat fryer going. Take out the basket, it just gets in the way, and set the temperature up to 190C.
Once the fryer’s up to heat, take a tablespoon of the mixture, slide it into the oil. Repeat until you’ve got half a dozen frying away in your pan. Give it a couple of minutes (do some washing up in the meantime, this recipe always seems to generate a lot of mess) then turn them over. Another couple of minutes and take one out. Carefully (remember, the oil is going to be hot and so are the fresh pakoras) break it open and check it’s cooked right through. If it is, great! Take the lot out and put them on some kitchen paper in a basket to drain off the oil. If it isn’t, pop it back in and give it another minute then check again (with a different one). The finished article should be crispy, taste delicious and a nice, golden, brown. Now’s your chance to add more salt, more chilli, change the mix a little before you fry off the rest.
Once you’ve got them all cooked, you can eat them there and then (I’ve usually not got a shortage of quality control officers to check that my work is up to spec) or put them into an air-tight box and save them for a few days. Re-heating them is best done under the grill rather than in the microwave. I put them into the kids lunch boxes for school and I’ve not had one returned yet.
Now you’ll need dips. Lots and lots of dips. Sambals of assorted types work well, chutneys, mint & yoghurt, sweet chilli sauce, the red lentil dhall from the week before last… Your only limit is your imagination here.
So go! Experiment! See what it’s like with diced sprout (or not), mushrooms, plantain! Raid the veg cupboard and see what you’ve got left! The only really essential bits are the onion and the kale (or spinach).
And now I’m hungry. I’ve got shopping to do. It’s always a bad idea to shop hungry.
April 1, 2011
Can we have another power cut, please?
It’s Random Wednesday, we had a power cut over the whole of Shetland last night, and I’ve just finished going through the aftermath of that.
Now that computers have become such an ever-present part of our lives, the very idea of a power cut fills me with hope and pleasure. Strange, you might say, given that I work in IT and depend on all those computers to keep me in beer and crisps. But no. No power equals no computers, no computers equals no problems. More importantly, at home, no power equals no TV and no internet. That means we have to – drumroll please… – talk to each other! And not just the adults! The kids have to talk as well!
This power cut took us off for a while overnight. I was reading in bed at the time (using the Kindle app on my phone, so no power for a while means no eBooks either) so apart from it suddenly being very, very dark, no real problems. I knew the UPS systems at work would shut everything down gracefully and that we’d have some problems with things not coming back with the power. But the last power cut… That was great fun!
Power went off early evening. Smallest kids were in bed, eldest 2 watching TV. The groans of horror that emanated from the lounge as their umbilical connection to Entertainment was severed shook the place to its very foundations.
“No problems,” said I, “We’ll light some candles and play a game.”
“Awwww, dad, do we have to!” In stereo. Dad’s games are, apparently, not known for their fun quotient.
“It’ll be fun.” (Translation: We’re doing it. Stop whining or go to bed.)
So we lit candles in the kitchen, cracked open a Dungeons and Dragons starter set one of them had brought home from Out of School Club because they’d thought I might like it, and started playing.Two hours later, when the power flickered back on, we switched the lights off, unplugged the microwave (irritating flashing clock) and carried on playing until the dragon was well and truly slain. Much fun was had by all and two new players for Dungeons and Dragons had entered the arena. The kids were begging for another power cut so we could play some more. “Why wait?” said I.
Thus was born our Friday Night Gaming Session. We’ve battled our way through a couple of adventures using www.trolllord.com‘s Castles and Crusades system (great, old-school gaming. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons feel without all that tedious messing around with THAC0 and other things that I really shouldn’t remember as much about but do). When we’d finished adventuring, we stepped into the TARDIS and defeated Autons underneath a seaside village locked in a time loop.
When we wanted to take a break from the roleplaying games, we broke out the playing cards – nothing teaches a kid to add up faster than money being at stake. Well, I say “money”. I mean pasta spirals. That’s our bank in Pontoon, a big box of pasta spirals. They’re uncooked but that doesn’t stop the more inquisitive players from munching on them. When Pontoon got old, we moved to dominoes. When we tired of dominoes, Magic: The Gathering had an outing, Lego games, Carcassonne. We played as a family. Fantastic fun all-round.
Unfortunately, more often than not, we’re back to Simpsons re-runs now. The television has a more powerful draw than fighting goblins or Daleks in your imagination. Passive entertainment has trumped active. So I have a plan. Last night’s power cut made me realise that if that’s what it takes to get the games played, then the power will be cut. Specifically to the lights and not the sockets – I hate having to reset all those different clocks.
Gaming will happen. And it will happen this Friday. I haven’t decided yet whether we’re going for Castles and Crusades, Doctor Who or some other game. Maybe we’ll fight dinosaurs in the Hollow Earth, defeat supervillains whilst maintaining our secret identities, fly X-wing fighters along the trench of a third Death Star that the Rebels have only just found out about. Who knows? The only thing I know for certain is that, right now, anything is possible. And that on Friday night, there’ll be a cry of “Awwwww, dad! Did you *have* to switch that off?” at 7:15PM. But that bedtime will come all too soon for them and they’ll be begging for a power cut on Saturday night.
Mind you, I’ve seen the TV listings for Saturday. A power cut would be a blessing!
March 30, 2011
Vignette, an Android Camera App (#vignette)
I’ve had an Android phone for just over a year now and the thing that amazes me most is the sheer range and diversity of the apps that are available. There’s nothing more satisfying than finding out that your phone can enhance your life in ways you’d never have thought possible.
For a long time I stuck to the free apps, for they are many, and I’ve got some really great tools. Tweetdeck to manage Twitter and Facebook, WordPress for my blog here, Google Sky Maps, Google Reader, Amazon’s Kindle app, Evernote. Loads of them. But the first app I bought was a camera app called Vignette and this remains my favourite app of them all.
http://neilandtheresa.co.uk/Android/Vignette/
Vignette is a camera app, taking your built-in Android phone camera and enhancing it with a wide variety of photographic effects and frames. The free version is good up to a certain image resolution, the paid-for version is good up to the full resolution of your camera. Trust me on this, you want the paid version.
When you fire up Vignette it gives you a slightly different view of your camera than the standard. Down the left (or at the top) you’ve the zoom control, at the right (or at the bottom) you’ve got the actual controls for shooting mode, hardware settings, resolution, and – this is my favourite bit – frames & effects.
Vignette operates by taking the photograph and then applying the chosen effects and frames to it. This can either be a destructive process (you don’t keep the original image) or a non-destructive process (where a copy of the original picture your camear captured is kept). Obviously, if you’ve got the space on the memory card, you want to keep the originals.
The shooting mode screen lets you pick the usual normal photos, fixed focus shots, self-timer, the slightly annoying “steady shot” mode that waits until your camera is rock-steady before taking the photo (trying to grab a shot of something whilst holding my 9-month old boy over the weekend, I had to switch this off!) and the far more interesting time lapse, strip, grid, double-exposure and blind shots. See? The potential for fun is there already. You can only pick one of these modes, so you can’t shoot blind double-exposures in time-lapse, but would you really want to?
Once you get to the Effect and frame menu you’re into really fun territory. I recommend trying completely random to start with – random effect, random frame. You cannot predict from one photograph to the next what you’re going to get. It’s great. The only problem with that is that every once in a while you will see an amazing photograph and wonder what effects were applied to make it that way – and there’s no way to work that out. Frames you can make a good guess at (that’s a panoramic shot, or that’s the 35mm film frame) but effects? If you can work those out then you’re better at this than me!
When you open up the effect menu the choices are overwhelming. There’s a full list of the effects on the developer’s website: http://neilandtheresa.co.uk/Android/Vignette/List%20of%20features/
Once you get a combination you like, you can save it to your favourites and even create a shortcut to launch Vignette with those settings pre-configured.
There’s an active group on flickr for sharing the photos you’ve taken – it’s here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/vignette/ – and there are some truly beautiful photos on there. Those in the know add the settings they’ve used on their app so you can have a reasonable chance of replicating the photographic style they’re using.
Vignette was the first app I bought, having played with the demo of the app for a day. Not once have I regretted it. When I’ve had questions about the app, the developers have been a joy to deal with. They take feedback very seriously, every email goes into a tracking system so that it is not forgotten and not ignored.
The photographs dotted about this post are ones I’ve taken using the random frame / random effect setting. I love not knowing how a picture is going to turn out, it adds a magic to the process that the move to digital cameras has lost.
One final trick that this app can do – it will apply effects to photographs you’ve already taken. If you copy pictures from your desktop across onto your phone’s memory card you can then play with them to your heart’s content!
March 28, 2011