adventures in vegetarian cooking

When Kathy visited, we went to an Ethiopian restaurant and ordered "sambosas" as an appetizer, which turned out to be very, very similar to "sambousacs," from Saudi Arabia. I have a recipe for sambousacs, but it's definitely not vegetarian, so I was very excited that the Ethiopian restaurant had sambosas made with lentils. I tried and failed to find a satisfactory recipe online (part of the problem is the variety of different spellings used for sambosas/sambousacs/samoosas/etc.), so I forged ahead and tried to adapt the recipe myself, and I figured I'd post it in case some hungry vegetarian is looking for a similar recipe in the future.

Here's the original recipe:

• 1 medium onion, chopped


• 1/2 to 3/4 lb ground beef


• 1/2 t. salt


• 3/4 to 1 t. cumin


• 1 small ripe tomato, chopped


• 1 c. finely chopped parsley


• 1/2 c. fried pinenuts (fry in oil on med-hi until golden brown)


• dough to wrap everything in (preferably long rectangular strips that you can fold up into triangles, but wonton wrappers will work fine too)

1. Brown beef and sautee onions together.


2. Shake salt onto mixture


3. Add cumin, stir in


4. Add tomato and cook some more


5. Stop cooking; stir in parsley and pinenuts


6. Place ~2 t. of mixture at one end of wrapper and fold into triangle shape


7. Fry on med-hi until light brown

First of all, I was unsure of what an appropriate beef to lentil conversion would be, since beef shrinks when you cook it while lentils grow... but I settled on 1 c. of dry lentils, which seemed to work okay. I boiled the lentils for about 15 minutes (what the package recommended) with half of the onion. 1/2 t. of salt seemed like a lot, so I added less, which I think was a good decision. I also used less cumin--about 1/2 t. I sauteed the other half of the onion along with a couple of cloves of garlic, and added those to the lentils (I don't know if it matters that I added this afterwards, but boiling garlic just sounded sketchy to me). The rest of the recipe I didn't mess with, except to use wonton wrappers instead of making or buying the right kind of dough. Done correctly, they would look more like this.

The prospect of frying things is always a little daunting to me, because I have so little experience with it, but the Joy of Cooking came to the rescue... I used about 3 inches of corn/canola oil (because I didn't have enough of either), and on Cacique's stove, 350 degrees is achieved by turning the burner to approximately 5.75 on a scale from 0 to 10 (to figure this out, I used the test recommended in Joy of Cooking, which is to drop in a cube of bread for 60 seconds, and if it's nicely browned, then the oil is the right temperature).

I was pretty happy with how they turned out, although I think the flavoring of the filling could be improved by someone more skilled than I.

[edit] I tried Katie's suggestions of sage and coriander, and did another batch with cinnamon. I didn't keep track of which was which, but I haven't tasted a bad one yet. [/edit]

And I took pictures...

Mmm... pinenuts


Dip your finger in water and brush along the edges to make them stick.


Ready?


Go!


Done. Remember to flip them partway through.