We wanted to go out for a meal on a Monday night so were quite limited for choice of restaurant – most of the best are closed on Sunday and Monday. Surprisingly the Michelin-starred Simpsons was open. This was our second visit and the food was marvellous. It wasn’t quite as imaginative as at L’Enclume, which is still the best one-starred restaurant I’ve been to, but Simpsons is local so defintely worth an occasional visit.

Made from fresh cooked beetroot and based on a Delia cheese scones recipe. I was excited to try out a variation on the plain cheese scone. It worked quite well.

I made these samosa tonight. They look good but the picture doesn’t reveal the lack of crispiness in the cases. I phoned my mum after I’d made them to find out why the cases turned out more chewy than crispy and she told me I was supposed to make the dough with some oil in it. I have used oil in samosa dough before but because I’ve been in a breadmaking mindset lately, tonight I made my samosa dough in the same way as bread dough i.e. without fat. Doh!

Other points to note: As with all potato-based food, the filling needs a reasonable amount of salt. The pastry also need salting and some lemon juice too. I tried cider vinegar as an alternative but it wasn’t as good.

1 Feb 2013
I made samosa tonight using the recipe in the Indian Vegetarian Cooking book. I’ve found that you can cut down the oil in the dough by a sixth. Also, add the juice of half a lemon when doubling the book’s recipe for tasty and crispy pastry. Also, instead of making neat parcels how Mum taught me, I just made quarter-circle shaped ones by simply folding over a semicircle in half and gluing and pinching together the edges. This makes them visually bigger and gives lovely crispy edges. They seem to cook quicker too, I suppose because there aren’t any double layers of pastry. Next time I might try trying them with the lid on to see if that makes any difference.

3 Feb 2013
Now that I’ve perfected the pastry I have found that the samosa are best freshly fried. They don’t ever get quite as crispy when reheated in the oven. I could part fry them but it would be best to fry them just before serving.

Used a Jamie Oliver recipe for roast carrots tonight. It worked quite well.

Baking is a good activity when it’s too cold to play outside. I use one of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s chocolate recipes for choc chip cookies (scroll down to the bottom of the article).

EDIT 06/06/12@: To get squidgy cookies, whip them out of the oven as soon as the outer edge has coloured. Mr W prefers them crunchy like biscuits though, so for him they need to stay in a bit longer. Add 50g of chopped nuts for a nutty variation.

I also made some bread. It’s nowhere near as good as Waitrose bakery bread but I enjoy producing a loaf purely by hand.

Made some sausage casserole today, using roughly the recipe on the back of the sausage packet.

The casserole was tasty (it always pays to use good quality stock) but more noteworthy is that I cooked sausages well for perhaps the first time in my life. First they went into the oven at 160 degrees until they were cooked through. Then I browned them off on a rack (to stop them rolling about) under the grill, turning them every so often so that they coloured beautifully all round. They did lose a lot of juices but, since they were good quality sausages and they were going into casserole anyway, it didn’t matter. I cooked the casserole part separately and put the components together to be frozen in batches. It’s always good to have a ready meal or two in the freezer.

EDIT 10 Apr 2012: Best way to cook sausages for the casserole: after browning under grill as detailed above, put them into thr casserole and cook the whole thing at 150 degrees. This results in very tender sausages.

My mum has never made anything she called ‘pakora’. What she does do however, is coat certain thinly sliced vegetables in a batter made from gram flour, deep fry them and call them ‘bhajya’. As far as I can tell, pakora are the same as bhajya except that pakora are made with a mixture of different vegetables and end up bigger whereas bhajya are made with only one or possibly two types and end up smaller.

I made some potato bhajya based loosely on the pakora recipe in Veena Chopra’s Real Indian Cookery. The potatoes were peeled and sliced thinly before coating in batter and then deep fried. (Note for future: leaving the potato slices in the batter made the batter watery.) They had to be fried slowly so that they cooked through without the outside burning. The bhajya weren’t very spicy but they were made to be dipped into homemade chilli jam so they weren’t supposed to be. They are best eaten straight away; even reheating in the oven did not recapture the original crispiness.

The Atrium is Birmingham College of Food’s training restaurant. This means you can get near enough Michelin star food at a fraction of the price. We went there for a family meal last night. Splendid food, as usual.